For Jonelle Clark, identity has been something she’s grown into throughout her life.
Whether it was being a standout athlete at Eastern Kentucky, where she earned all-conference honors as a pitcher for the Colonels. Or becoming a devoted wife and partner to Shawn Clark, an assistant coach on the football team at EKU, or later becoming a loving mother to two children.
It wasn’t easy at times, but she had always found a way to adapt, to be what she or her family needed her to be.
“I’d say it was five to 10 years, where I was like, ‘Okay, I finally felt this comfort and peace and sense of security in that role,’ ” Clark recently told the Sentinel.
Clark had grown into her identity, thriving as her husband climbed the coaching ladder.
Clark joined Scott Frost’s new coaching staff at UCF on Jan. 4, 2025, becoming the Knights’ offensive line coach. Nine months later, on Sept. 10, Clark was hospitalized after suffering a medical emergency, according to UCF officials.
“I can’t tell you how much I like Shawn,” Frost recalled recently. “He’s one of those guys that when you’re around him for about two weeks, you feel like you’ve known him your whole life. He was going to be a lifelong friend for me.”
But just as Jonelle had gotten comfortable in her new surroundings, she found herself once again front and center with a new challenge.
Three weeks into the 2025 college football season, her husband was hospitalized.
“He came into the office on the bye week with a smile on his face like he always had and checked in with me, making sure I was okay, which he always did,” Frost said. “Later that night, I got a call from my agent, who was his agent, that he was in the hospital.”
“We were in the hospital for 12 days and … I was a mix of emotions,” Jonelle Clark said. “I was scared and sad and angry and confused and hopeful. I thought I should have been smarter. I wish I had known. I wish I had thought to say something (to Shawn).
It was during this time, sitting in the hospital next to her husband, that Clark came up with the idea for an initiative. One that she hoped to share with her husband by her side after he recovered.
“I said, ‘When we’re done with this, I’m going to make him be done with coaching. That’s enough. He’s devoted too much of this, his life, to coaching and this is what’s happened,’ she recalled. “We can inform people, we can go around the country and we can spread awareness.”
Success, it seems, comes at a cost and for some coaches, that includes working long hours with little to no sleep, eating takeout food and getting little exercise. It was a lifestyle that Jonelle Clark had become all too familiar with in the more than two decades together with her husband.
Unfortunately, those plans would never come to fruition as Shawn Clark unexpectedly passed away on Sept. 22.
Friends, family, administrators, coaches and former and current players would share Clark’s legacy as a husband, father, coach and leader. His impact was felt by many, particularly those he touched during his time at Appalachian State, where he was a former player and eventually head coach.
In the midst of this terrible loss, Jonelle Clark didn’t want anyone else to have to go through what she and her two children, Giana and Braxton, went through. She pushed to create the Shawn Clark Legacy Foundation and launched The 61 Initiative.
“Everybody has tragedy in their life. There’s nobody who’s exempt and that can be how your story ends and you can let that dictate your life, or you can turn tragedy into testimony,” she said. “That’s what I want to do, so that we can do everything that we can to prevent something like this from happening.
“We live in a broken world, and bad things are going to happen, but if we can do something to help and spread the awareness, I would appreciate that as a football family and a wife. I just hope this reached a larger audience and it already has, so I’m excited about that.”
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Clark’s mission is simple: She does not want another coach, family, team, or community to have to experience this type of loss again.
“Coaches are just built differently,” Clark explains. “They sacrifice time with their family and friends, they sacrifice sleep, they sacrifice hobbies,” Clark said. “Now that I look back, I just wish that I could have connected it all together. I wish there had been something in place that people said, ‘Hey, these are the things that we need.’ ”
“When you go through something like that, it’s traumatizing and this is a really admirable way for her to make sure that it didn’t happen for no reason and it’s going to lead to something better,” said Frost.
For Frost, the grief of losing his friend had to wait. “I had to keep moving forward and I don’t think that gave me time to really process it until after the season,” he said.
And not all issues coaches face are on the physical side, with mental health also being a huge concern. Clark believes that as college athletics continue to tackle issues such as name, image and likeness (NIL) and revenue sharing, it’s bound to have an impact on coaching staffs.
“It was stressful before, but with how the landscape is changing, with gambling and NIL, it just intensified the problem,” she said.
Frost knows firsthand about the stress of being a coach. He led UCF to an undefeated season in 2017 and returned home to coach at his alma mater, Nebraska. He was fired five seasons later before eventually returning to UCF last season.
“It’s such a high-stress job that sometimes the anxiety and pressure of it can get to you,” said Frost. “I’ve had issues where I’ve not been able to sleep because of it. This was a long time ago, but the pressure in my chest and feeling like something bad was going on, a lot of times it can be stress-related.”
UCF is one of 48 schools that have committed to the initiative, with more on the way.
“Our original goal was we wanted two schools represented per conference,” Clark said. “If we could get that, we would be doing a heck of a job and be pretty proud of ourselves. But we have nearly 50 schools in total.”
While UCF continues to work on its own plans to help coaches manage health and stress, Frost said his wife, Ashley, has taken it upon herself to schedule his doctors’ appointments.
“I imagine most coaches are like me, that I would probably overlook some things and man, my wife is on it,” he said.
And as Jonelle continues to share her story with others, it’s helped her deal with her own grief along the way.
“It’s scary to say something out loud at the beginning. It’s scary to say he’s gone,” she said. “But the more you say it, the more real it becomes to you.”
If you’re interested in getting involved with The 61 Initiative, contact Nolan Jones, chief operating officer of the Shawn Clark Legacy Foundation, at [email protected].
Please find me on X, Bluesky or Instagram @osmattmurschel. Email: [email protected]. Sign up for the Sentinel’s Knights Weekly newsletter for a roundup of all our UCF coverage.
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