Scott Steward arrived in Salem in 1988. He had no intention of staying.

Raised in Lowell, Indiana, he had his sights on college football. He'd served as a graduate assistant, pursued collegiate opportunities, and taken the position at Salem Community High School as a pragmatic interim step. The plan was to keep moving up.

Then life intervened — in the best possible way. A baby arrived. He and his wife, Tracie, bought a house. They found a church, made friends, and discovered something that surprised him: he didn't want to leave. By 1990, when he took over as head football coach, Salem had stopped feeling like a waypoint and started feeling like home.

"I say it's family," Steward said when asked what defines Salem. "When Tracie and I first came, we didn't know a soul. And all of a sudden, we had friends, and we found a church, and the next thing you know, I wasn't looking for jobs every year. I was enjoying the one I had."

He stayed for 34 years, coaching football and baseball before becoming athletic director in 1995 — a role he held for 27 years until his retirement in 2022. Today, he serves as athletic director at Kaskaskia College, staying close to the work he loves.

Throughout those decades, Steward held a philosophy about what athletics actually accomplish. Sports are not, in his view, primarily about winning — though winning matters. They're a laboratory in which young people develop discipline, accountability, resilience, and the ability to work alongside others toward something larger than themselves. He saw it happen with players who came in without much structure at home, who found family inside a football program. "Any sport is that way," he said. "You spend more time in football than just about anything — and the family that becomes part of your life when you're a member of that team, that's real."

One of the things he argued most consistently was the value of multi-sport participation. His son Cole played four sports at Salem — football, basketball, baseball, and track — and Scott pushed hard for that. It wasn't just sentiment. When he was recruiting at SIU as a graduate assistant, he saw it from the other side: college coaches specifically sought multi-sport athletes because the variety showed coachability, adaptability, and a competitive edge that one-sport specialists often couldn't demonstrate. "We like to go watch a running back play basketball," he said. "See how he runs the floor, what kind of teammate he is, how he takes coaching." A kid who plays one sport year-round, he believes, risks burnout and loses the freshness that comes from shifting gears.

That same long-view thinking shaped his stewardship of the Salem Athletic Hall of Fame. Following John Cavalletto — who founded the Hall — and a brief tenure by Greg Gruenkemeyer, Steward guided the committee for over two decades. The standard was deliberate and exacting: athletes must be out of high school for 15 years before they can be considered (it was once 20, reduced only recently). The waiting period isn't bureaucratic caution — it's philosophical. Athletic achievement is the floor, not the ceiling. Character, citizenship, and what a person has built after high school are weighted just as heavily. "Who they are as an adult sometimes is more important than what they did as an athlete," Steward said. The committee has never had to remove someone — a record he credits to that discipline.

Toward the end of our conversation, Steward humbly pointed out his own place in the institution he helped steward. He's a member of the Salem Community High School Athletic Hall of Fame and was inducted into the Illinois Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2013. Both honors carry weight, in part because of how well he understands what it means to be held to that standard.

His three children were all athletes at Salem. Cole went on to play football at SIU, earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in five years, worked in athletic administration at Western Kentucky University, and recently returned to SIU Carbondale — where colleagues greeted him with a simple phrase: welcome home. Megan is a speech-language pathologist; her husband, also in athletic administration, just accepted a position at UAB. Mallory just completed her anesthesiology residency at Saint Louis University and is joining a 20-member team at Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Missouri.

"I always say it's a good thing they had their mother's brains and not their father's brains," Steward said.

That's the humility talking. Anyone who knows Scott Steward's career knows better.