My friend Jamie: Beloved NC coach and teacher dies of COVID at 51, and a school mourns
Jamie Seitz liked to check on people.
Every time I saw him at Lincoln Charter School in Denver — where he had been a beloved elementary school PE teacher and high school coach since 2009 — Seitz would smile and ask me, “Everything going OK?”
Then he’d pause and wait — actually wait — for the answer. Because unlike a lot of people, Seitz wanted to know. He wanted to know if he could help you, and he wanted to know how you were doing, and he would ask about all your kids by name and whether they were OK, too.
None of us are doing OK this week. On Sunday night, Jamie Seitz died. The cause of death was COVID-19, according to his family. He was 51 years old.
Seitz had been teaching and coaching as usual until early December. He had no known underlying health conditions. He left behind his wife, Liz, his 17-year-old son, Carter, his 13-year-old daughter, Peyton, and a school that is utterly devastated.
One week before he died, on Dec. 20, Seitz and I had a text conversation. The coach was inside his hospital room. The family had rigged it up with a Nerf basketball goal hanging off the TV, one they bought at Target at his daughter’s suggestion so he could think about something besides his oxygen levels.
Seitz was unable to speak because of shortness of breath, but he could use his phone. He told me that his COVID-19 diagnosis, first received Dec. 9, had been complicated by pneumonia. Breathing was difficult when he moved in any direction.
“If I turn, I can’t breathe,” he texted. “If I sit up, I can’t breathe.”
But like a good coach, Seitz mainly wanted to praise his team — his family, nurses, doctors, students, teachers and fellow coaches.
“I will not be out of ICU for a bit and not out of (the) hospital for awhile,” he wrote. “But right now I’m glad to be alive, and to have such great support from my family and little Denver NC. I’m truly a blessed individual. ... If you want an emotional, uplifting, positive story, let me know.”
That story didn’t turn out the way any of us wanted. But I’m still going to write this in the way Seitz envisioned it. Because the more you hear about Seitz, the more you will feel better, not worse.
The mayor of Denver
Jamie Seitz taught or coached all four of my kids at Lincoln Charter School, located about 25 miles northwest of Charlotte in Lincoln County. We knew each other for a decade and were friends, which doesn’t make me a bit unique.
Seitz knew just about everybody in a 10-mile radius of the school, it seemed, and he was friends with all of them. A lot of people started sentences with “My friend Jamie” or “Coach Seitz said.” Although our small Denver community doesn’t have a mayor, its unofficial mayor was Jamie Seitz.
At Seitz’s candlelight memorial service at his school Wednesday, more than a thousand people showed up, even though they had to listen to the service inside their cars due to the very disease that had killed the coach they were honoring.
After the service, the people spread out in parking lots lit by candles. They released more than 100 prayer lanterns, which looked like giant fireflies as they glided into the evening sky.
“We knew he was an incredibly special person,” said Denny Seitz, Jamie’s older brother. “We didn’t realize so many other people knew it, too.”
Jamie Seitz became part of several sad statistics when he passed away. With COVID-19 surging across both Carolinas, Seitz is one of nearly 350,000 U.S. residents who have died from the disease so far. In the past nine months, the coronavirus has killed roughly one out of every 1,000 Americans.
To Lincoln Charter School, though, Seitz wasn’t one in a thousand. He was one in a million — a 6-foot-4 ball of compassionate enthusiasm who had tiny kindergartners looking forward to PE class after their first week of school.
He would wear funny hats to entertain them. He would let them practice dance moves. He made the worst athlete and the best athlete in a class feel equally special.
“Jamie was the closest thing our elementary school had to a celebrity,” said Jonathan Bryant, Lincoln Charter’s chief administrator. “When he walked through that building, you half-expected him to be trailed by paparazzi. He had that special sauce you want in every teacher. The kids just loved him.”
Seitz was masterful at getting kids to pay attention without yelling at them. From western New York originally, he was also a lifelong Buffalo Bills fan.
Whenever the kids began getting slightly unruly, he would lead them in a chant of “Let’s go, Buffalo!” He would let them say it once or twice, unleashing some pent-up energy, and then they would quiet down.
Years later, those kids would see Seitz in a hallway or at a gym and greet him with “Let’s go, Buffalo!” The phrase became his personal soundtrack. In the hospital, he was able to watch several Bills games, and he was looking forward to Buffalo’s upcoming appearance in the playoffs. The Bills have never won a Super Bowl, but Seitz thought this might be the year.
His fandom was so well known that news of it reached the Bills. The team’s play-by-play announcer, John Murphy, mentioned Seitz on the air during Buffalo’s win over New England on Monday night and offered condolences to the family.
And Brandon Beane, the Bills’ general manager and a former Carolina Panthers employee, sent Carter Seitz a text Wednesday that read in part: “I heard about your father passing away and wanted to reach out to say I am praying for you and your family during this difficult time. I have heard what a great Dad he was.”
At Seitz’s memorial service, a number of family members and friends wore Bills jerseys, and several children came on-stage to lead a “Let’s Go, Buffalo!” chant.
‘We’re moving’
The Seitzes don’t know how Jamie contracted the coronavirus. He was careful, always wearing a mask in public and at school, his family said. He had returned to in-person teaching but followed the recommended guidelines.
“There’s just no way to know how he got it,” said Liz Seitz, Jamie’s wife. “Between school and everything else — I mean, we were very careful. We had to go to the grocery store, but not anything over and above that.”
“Our family member is gone and it’s a horrible loss,” said Denny Seitz, Jamie’s brother. “If somebody were trying to lay blame, at the end I just don’t know how much that would matter. No matter what it was or who it was, our loved one is gone.”
What Liz Seitz does know about her husband, however, is why he won’t be forgotten.
“People will remember Jamie mostly for his kindness and compassion,” she said.
Liz and Jamie Seitz were married for 19 years. They grew up in New York and met in Buffalo, but Liz took a business trip to the Charlotte area 17 years ago, on a lovely springtime day in North Carolina when there was still snow on the ground in New York. She was eight months pregnant at the time with Carter. She came back and proclaimed: “We’re moving.”
They made the move so quickly that Carter, now a high school senior and 6-foot-5 forward at Lincoln Charter, was born in North Carolina.
A nationally recognized hero
Jamie Seitz was the third of Dennis and Janice Seitz’s four kids. His older brother, Denny, was once a sportswriting colleague of mine at The Charlotte Observer. Denny and Jamie Seitz were always close, with basketball a common thread. They both played for their father, Dennis, a legendary New York prep coach, in high school.
“We were so lucky as kids,” Denny Seitz said. “We lived a storybook life.”
It wasn’t always a peaceful life, however. On May 20, 1999, as a 30-year-old coach in Addison, N.Y., Jamie Seitz and another coach were driving Seitz’s Jeep to a baseball practice. In the road they saw a frantic woman holding her daughter, and just behind her was a man running toward the woman and brandishing a knife.
It turned out the man had abducted the woman from another state. Seitz and the other coach got out of their car and fought off the man, who stabbed the woman in the thigh during the brawl.
Seitz broke the assailant’s nose with his first punch and then broke his jaw with his second punch. “He was always proud about that part,” Denny Seitz said.
The woman and the child were taken to safety. But in the fight, Jamie Seitz sustained an arm injury that would later require hospitalization and surgery. The assailant also stole Seitz’s Jeep in the melee and totaled it before being caught by police.
Few outside his immediate family know that story. But Seitz later received a Carnegie Medal from the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission in Pittsburgh for his action, honored for his “outstanding act of heroism.”
‘I just love these kids’
Seitz adored all the kids he taught, whether it was PE to 8-year-olds or basketball to 18-year-olds. He was a gregarious optimist who tried to look on life’s bright side. Fellow coach Josh Williams was one of his closest friends. Seitz would often burst into Williams’ office like Kramer used to do on “Seinfeld,” then proclaim: “Gimme some good news!”
Seitz was Lincoln Charter’s head basketball coach from 2009-13 and then became an assistant under Brad Gabriel while also still coaching the golf team and, occasionally, the middle school volleyball team. He was a coach on the school’s 1A state championship teams in both basketball and golf in 2017.
In the early 2010s, when Seitz was the head coach of the high school basketball team, Daniel Schmitz assisted him for one season and was struck both by Seitz’s skill as a defensive coach and his charisma.
“We’d be at the end of a super-tight game,” Schmitz said, “and he would look back at me and wink. Jamie loved the drama.”
Schmitz later became the school’s athletic director. Seitz would occasionally draw a technical foul for complaining to the referees, then come in and apologize the next day to Schmitz for getting one.
“I never get technicals,” he would say. That wasn’t technically true, but in Seitz’s mind it was true, because he said it every single time he drew one.
Seitz could be headstrong. Williams once found Seitz at school trying to cut a cast off his own wrist with some scissors.
“It’s bothering me,” Seitz explained.
I’ve coached Lincoln Charter School’s men’s tennis team as a volunteer for the past 10 years. At the end of every school year, we’d have a gathering to celebrate all the teams and hand out various awards in the spring sports. To keep the night from stretching for hours, the athletic director would warn us every year that we only got to give a 5-minute speech about our teams.
But Seitz just couldn’t help it.
He would begin by using up his entire five minutes on his first golfer. Then he’d go on to the second, and then the third. He always went over the time limit and, by the time he praised each golfer, you would have thought they all could have beaten Tiger Woods. But his enthusiasm was so contagious that nobody minded.
“I just love these kids so much,” he would always say at some point, and no one ever doubted that. The school plans to establish a scholarship in Jamie Seitz’s name.
COVID-19 diagnosis
Seitz was feeling OK until early December, he told me in our Dec. 20 texts. Then he got a headache. He got tested for COVID-19 on Dec. 6 and was diagnosed Dec. 9. The family was quarantining together by then.
Gradually, his breathing got worse.
“On Dec. 11, he was having difficulty breathing, so we called an ambulance,” Liz Seitz said.
Jamie Seitz never left the hospital. A number of times, though — especially after he saw his family, even through a pane of glass — he would seem to be getting better. The family’s emotions whipsawed from delight to despair.
“It was weird,” Denny Seitz said. “So many times, Liz would send out a family email and the news would be so encouraging. And all of a sudden, an hour later, if they took off his oxygen mask for something, he would be laboring for every single breath. And he would get really scared.”
Like so many COVID-19 families, the Seitzes longed to see Jamie up close more than they were able to. “One thing that pained all of us was because of this disease,” Denny Seitz said, “we couldn’t hug him. We couldn’t pat him on the shoulder. We couldn’t get to him. He was such a social person, too, so that hurt.”
Seitz wanted to stay off a ventilator, knowing the seriousness of that step. But on Dec. 26, the day after Christmas, he was having so much trouble breathing that he agreed to be put on a ventilator, his wife said. A last-minute prayer vigil was organized at Lincoln Charter on Dec. 27, and more than 200 people showed up.
That night, though, with his wife and two children by his side, Seitz passed away.
Three days after that, Seitz’s candlelight memorial service at Lincoln Charter included a 22-second moment of silence.
The number 22 has always brimmed with significance for the Seitz family. Jamie’s father, Dennis Seitz, wore it as a basketball player, and so did Jamie and Denny Seitz. Now, Jamie’s daughter Peyton wears 22 for her volleyball team and Carter wears 22 for his basketball team.
Most of the women in the Seitz family wear No. 22 necklaces. Janice Seitz, Jamie’s mother, has the number 22 engraved on the top right corner of her tombstone.
Given all that, no one in the Seitz family was particularly surprised at Jamie Seitz’s time of death Sunday night.
It was 10:22 p.m. In military time, that’s 22:22 p.m.
Jamie Seitz’s texts
In our last text exchange on Dec. 20, Jamie Seitz was already thinking ahead about how to return to school and describe his battle with COVID-19 in his PE and health classes.
“Jamie could make anything into a teachable moment,” Denny Seitz said.
That’s what he wanted to do. In our conversation, he wrote about what he would emphasize when telling future students about his struggle.
“It’s a story I’ll (be) telling my classes for as long as I live,” he texted. “Family. Compassion. Toughness. Kindness. Perseverance. Humility. Hard Work. Dedication. I’ve always lived by them and now it’s time to share why they are important!!!!”
Then, from his hospital bed, wearing an oxygen mask, he texted something that was very much like him.
“If u need anything more from me,” he said, “let me know.”
Jamie Seitz never got back to that classroom. But his memory will remain; none of us ever forget the ones we loved.
So do me a favor today, will you? Think of a teacher or coach who was important to you. Think of your own version of Jamie Seitz, the person in school who made you feel like you mattered.
If she or he has passed away, tell someone you love about them.
But if that teacher or coach is alive, check on them.
Ask if they’re OK.
And really wait for the answer.
This story was originally published December 31, 2020 at 9:37 AM.
