People who knew John Etchison as a teacher, coach, co-worker and friend use words like dynamic, selfless and “a good man” to describe him. They talk about how he was all about the kids and would do anything for his two daughters. Etchison, 46, died in a house fire early Saturday morning near Yellow Creek Lake. The preliminary investigation by the Indiana State Fire Marshal’s Office determined the fire appears to have been accidental. Etchison was a social studies teacher at Edgewood Middle School until spring 2015. He then took a position at Louis Dreyfus Commodities in Claypool. Edgewood Principal JoElla Smyth Tuesday recalled hiring Etchison when she was the assistant principal back in the early 1990s. “I remember him coming in for the interview and it was for social studies, and there were a lot of candidates. I remember him walking in with a briefcase, and popping that briefcase open, and pulling out one lesson after another about what he would do with the world history program, and I’m like ‘Wow.’ That was a wow moment,” she recalled. She said they found out he had been the quarterback of the Elwood state runner-up football team, so “we saw someone who also wanted to coach for us, wanted to coach football. Then he liked basketball. He was good enough that the high school finally finagled him over to coach the high school basketball program. Al (Rhodes) saw that in him, and he continued on as a teacher and coach when I came back as the principal.” Etchison at that time was coaching some of the middle school sports as well. He ended up over time coaching both of Smyth’s sons – Sam in football and Scott in football and basketball. “I still today vividly remember his interview because he was just a go-getter, ‘I can do this,’ and his connection and his ideas were so ... he had a lot of energy and a lot of enthusiasm for what he was going to do for kids. He was good for kids. When you saw that it was just amazing experiencing part of that,” Smyth said. Her daughter and Etchison’s daughter became very good friends for several years. “I know he loved his two daughters a lot,” she said. She said he was always busy as a teacher and coach, but “he was a really good dad.” Todd Braddock first met Etchison when he was Braddock’s seventh-grade social studies teacher at Edgewood. “I remember him as being very dynamic. He had a really good balance between joking around and getting the content across,” he said. “So I was immediately drawn to him because I knew he coached basketball at Warsaw and I love basketball, but then, at a little bit deeper level, we shared the interest of hunting and fishing, so we connected right off the bat.” Braddock remembered at that time at Edgewood, Coach Doug Ogle and Aaron Wolfe were teaching there, “all the guys who played a huge part in my life,” but Etchison was the guy he immediately connected with. Etchison talked Braddock into being the manager of the eighth-grade football team. Braddock was always a pretty good basketball player, so being a football manager was a different role he never really saw himself being in. “He convinced me that everyone has a really important job and that’s a really important job, too, so I decided to take it and it was really different for me, but I learned a lot just by being the manager and seeing things from that perspective and how that’s a really vital part of the team as well. That was good for me just in terms of developing that ability to be a good teammate, and seeing the other side of things,” he said. Braddock recalled when he had the opportunity to play at the high school. Ogle was the junior varsity and then became varsity coach. “I always remember, Etch was that guy that we all kind of connected with. He kind of related to all of us really well, and obviously I had that hunting connection with him,” he said. “But I remember he’d always come in with his orange hat on and his hunting boots to practice, and we would just laugh and we’d talk. I remember I would always get so excited to talk to him before practice to see if he had seen anything that morning and had any luck.” Years later, Braddock had the opportunity to come back to Warsaw as a teacher. Etchison was teaching seventh-grade social studies, and Braddock’s job now is seventh-grade social studies at Lakeview. “He was huge in helping Betsy (Fastbinder) and I along our first year of teaching back at Lakeview, getting our curriculum aligned and everything. It was fun to have him there as a resource,” he said. Braddock had coached under Jeff Grose for a couple of years before he got his first job. “But then my first actual coaching job where I was in charge of my own team was when (current senior) Kyle Mangas was a seventh-grader. I taught at Lakeview but I was coaching at Edgewood for Tracy (Horrell) and JoElla. So Etch was the eighth-grade basketball coach. He could get people motivated, which was interesting, because as an assistant coach under Al, he was quiet. But when he was the head guy, he was really good with the X’s and O’s,” he said. Etchison’s teams won a lot of games and were well-prepared for the high school level, he said. “So he was helpful to me as a newbie coach on my own, to talk to, to vent to,” Braddock said. “... But when you saw him you could just see he had a fire. When he was on he had the ability to lead ... He just kind of had a natural ability to lead and inspire and get the most out of his players. I think, honestly, a lot of his teams won the conference championship almost every year. He had a way of getting them to play at a high level at the end of the year, peaking at the right level. You just always felt his guys were prepared to play at the high school level.” Smyth said Etchison really loved coaching. She’s also heard many people talk about how he was one of their favorite teachers. “He had a more relaxed way about him where he had this big chair that sat in the middle of the room, duct taped together, but it was multiple colors of duct tape,” she said. “He was a very laid-back teacher, but the kids would do what he asked and got a solid education, she said. “He had a wall full of student pictures, and I think it was all the kids who wanted him to remember them. There had to be 200 pictures.” Braddock said art teacher Sherri Johnson would have her kids draw pictures of their teachers and “all kinds of kids tried to draw his picture, which I think shows you how much they liked him. He kept them on his wall.” He said his dad worked a lot while he was growing up, and his coaches, including Etchison, stepped in as fatherly figures while his dad tried to provide for the family. His dad told him whether he played or not, he had to be respectful toward the coaches. As a teacher now, Braddock sees how important that is. Wherever Edgewood needed Etchison, he would step in to help, especially where his daughters were involved, Smyth said. “He was a selfless guy. He would do anything for you, and if you needed something, he would help you out. Good advice. Good father,” Braddock said. “I wish he could hear what we say now. I think when you stop teaching and get into other business opportunities to work, I think that maybe you think people might forget you. ... He might have thought it didn’t matter because it was a long time ago, and yet I wish, and I hope, he can see and understand and hear how many people he touched in their lives and how many people are really going to miss him because he did make a difference. I hope somehow he will know that,” Smyth said.
