By day Galen Bessette 38, is a bus driver for the Sedona-Oak Creek School District. Also by day he is the new head coach for the Scorpion girls varsity soccer team. He partly credits driving for bolstering the program’s players numbers to have a full roster for the first time since 2022.
“It’s a testament to [Bessette] that we are able to field a girls soccer team for the first time in years, and much of that is due to his recruiting efforts,” Superintendent Tom Swaninger, Ph.D, said.
“The look on [Bessette’s] face was pure joy … when he came up to me to tell me that he had enough players to field the girls team this season,” Scorpion Boys Soccer Coach Gavin Shippen said. “The love he has for this game is amazing.”
While girls soccer and tackle football are both back in Sedona Red Rock High School’s fall sports schedule; the swim program has been canceled this year because SRRHS was unable to find a head coach for it.
“Our goal is to be as comprehensive of a high and middle school as possible and with the size of the school that we have it can be challenging,” Swaninger said. “But it’s a path that’s very important to us to continue our efforts to offer as many opportunities to our students as possible. So, it’s exciting that we see girls that are interested in soccer and they have the opportunity to get out on the field and play.”
Bessette was led to the Scorpion’s field after relocating to Cottonwood a year ago from Silver City, New Mexico after graduating from Western New Mexico University with his bachelor’s of science in kinesiology in 2023.
“I came here to hike … Humphreys Peak and on my way back to New Mexico, I drove through [Oak Creek] Canyon, through Sedona, through Cottonwood,” Bessette said. “It was just such a beautiful area that I decided I wanted to stay.”
Prior to moving to Silver City, Bessette’s family lived in Boulder, Colorado, before relocating to Connecticut. His mother, Jeann, is now a retired librarian, and his older brother by four years, Emmett, became an engineer.
“I switched majors a bunch of times, at one point I wanted to be a musician,” Bessette said. “I loved the creativity of music. I love to write music. I thought I wanted to be a musician because I had a lot of creative impulses, creative thoughts. … I ended up [leaving] a music program because it was very rigid and structured. It wasn’t nearly as expressive as I would have liked. A lot of music academia is all about following rules, learning pieces that have already been written, and playing them in the ‘right’ way … I just wanted to be able to express myself musically.”
Bessette said he grew up immersed in hard rock and heavy metal, playing guitar, bass and singing in bands. Through his teens and twenties, he wrote music for bands and himself, creating compositions with guitars, electronic keyboards and MIDI to produce songs, ringtones and jingles.
The creativity of soccer Bessette said is what drew him to the game after watching the 2012 World Cup and finding the personal stories of the Italian team compelling.
“There is an element of pageantry and drama in soccer that isn’t in most sports,” Bessette said reflecting about following Italy’s Serie A, league. “I began to see the differences between the clubs. Each one has a rich history and identity. Each team would play a different style of soccer — even though they were all in Italy and in the same league. That added to the storytelling element for me.”
The story of the girls soccer season hasn’t been written yet and Bessette said he is still learning the team’s strengths.
“I need to find the skill set that they can be good at for this team, and then I need to build the team around that play style,” Bessette said. “Then I need to get them to kind of come out of their shell and start expressing that creativity, so that we can basically learn to work together. … That’s where the story comes out of it is once they start working together, and once they start becoming tightly knit as a unit. That’s when the beautiful side of the game starts to appear.”
The Scorpions lost in their first two games back at home 0-9 before having the Arizona Interscholastic Association mercy rule invoked, on Sept. 2 against the Payson Longhorns and Thursday, Sept. 4, against the Northland Prep Scorpions.
“I’m really proud of those girls for overcoming the unknown and getting out there and getting a team together … that’s a huge positive,” Athletic Director Peter Brock said.
The continuing to build the program with an aspiration to create a junior varsity program Bessette said are among his goals.
“The glory of bus driving is that you get the morning shift, and the afternoon shift and a lot of places are so desperate for drivers that you can decide which your availability is … and the hourly rate is pretty decent for the shift hours that you get,” Bessette said.
The Scorpions are on the road and will return home to face off against the Holbrook Roadrunners on Monday, Sept. 22 at 6 p.m. and against the St. Johns Redskins on Monday, Oct. 6 at 4 p.m.
Bessette is looking for a volunteer assistant coach and he can be reached at (860) 539-5743.
“As a bus driver, that’s a reflection of my personality traits,” Bessette said. “I have a long attention span and a lot of patience which translates to safe driving. I also have a keen sense of space and spatial awareness. Which is part of the reason why I love soccer so much is because it’s a game of finding open space.”
While bus routes for the district are the same this fall for SOCSD, “we are razor thin,” Swaninger said about the total number of bus drivers working for the district.
“When there are additional responsibilities for drivers that we would like to initiate, for instance, a field trip or an additional bus route for an after school extracurricular activity,” Swaninger said. “Oftentimes, it can be challenging and impossible at times [to do]. So there are occasions when we cannot initiate different programs that we would like to because of our limited number of drivers.”
Visit sedonacreek.tedk12.com/hire/index.aspx to apply as a bus driver.
