A Soccer Coach in a Suit
Stephen Edward Tighe
Stephen Edward Tighe loved coaching school soccer so much that he considered quitting his job at Cantor Fitzgerald when he took on yet another team last August. He had begun to tire of the financial world, and he loved working with children more than doing anything else.
Mr. Tighe, 41, never screamed at his players the way some coaches do. "Unlucky" was his harshest word. When they played well, he would reward them with by shouting, "Magic!"
It was a tough schedule: there was his son Patrick's team, the Rockville Centre Revolution, which he coached twice a week; his son Michael's intramural team once a week; and on weekends the children's games, which he attended faithfully. When he became junior varsity soccer coach at the Kellenberg Memorial High School in August, his bosses at Cantor said he could work half days instead of quitting.
He would leave the World Trade Center every day at 3 p.m. to go back to Rockville Centre, on Long Island, where he grew up and still lived with his wife and four children, to coach the high school kids.
"He treated everybody's kid like they were his own," said his wife, Kathleen Tighe.
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