The Elizabethtown Area High School community is mourning the loss of a larger-than-life figure who modeled perseverance, dedication and the fine art of making everyone feel valued through careful and active listening.
Longtime Elizabethtown Area High School athletic director and school district guidance counselor Linda Ahern died Jan. 5, after an eight-year battle with pancreatic cancer. She was 71.
It was a struggle the community witnessed firsthand for many years as Ahern’s stage four diagnosis came in 2016, when she stepped away briefly but returned to stay on the job until her retirement in 2019.
She balanced work and chemotherapy, sometimes kicking the cancer back into remission, a back-and-forth that continued through her retirement.
The cancer kept coming back. Ahern continued to fight, waking early each morning to go for walks alongside former colleague Lynda Limpert.
“Linda was a force to be reckoned with,” Limpert said.
Three times an oncologist gave Ahern just months to live. Each time she beat the prediction.
“She never lost hope,” said Jackie Spittal, a former colleague. “She never lost faith.”
She leaves behind a lasting legacy at Elizabethtown Area High School, where she led a 44-year career mostly spent as a guidance counselor.
Ahern “was a staple in the community,” Spittal said. “Respected and strong.”
Ready to retire from a career as a guidance counselor in 2013, Ahern took on a second career when Elizabethtown had a sudden need for an athletic director. To those close to Ahern, the move wasn’t much of a surprise. She had a deep passion for sports that was sown in her at an early age.
‘Grew up with it’
“I love sports,” Ahern said in an LNP | LancasterOnline article in 2019. “I grew up with it. My father was very active. He was a John Harris (now Harrisburg High School) grad, a great athlete there.”
Ahern graduated from Mechanicsburg High School in 1971. Later that year she and her parents moved to Elizabethtown.
After Ahern earned a bachelor’s degree in social work from Lock Haven State College (now Lock Haven University), Elizabethtown High School hired her as guidance counselor in 1975, the start of a career in which she used some tools she learned in her upbringing.
“Be honest, fair, transparent when you can. Work hard. Those are all things my father said to me,” Ahern said in the 2019 LNP | LancasterOnline story. “Take pride in what you do.”
Throughout her years as guidance counselor at Elizabethtown, Ahern also coached track and field, field hockey and girls basketball.
“When I was a freshman (in 1981) she was our field hockey coach,” Cindy Telenko recalled. “We were doing something and she was irritated at us because we weren’t doing what we were supposed to do … We were all laughing. Linda got mad and made us run. We were running as we were laughing. The more we laughed, the more angry she got. She’d want to be serious but have a fun time, too.”
After college, Telenko returned to Elizabethtown to become a teacher. When Ahern became the athletic director a couple decades later, she talked Telenko into becoming the school’s field hockey coach.
“She was always a mentor, role model,” Telenko said. “But she’d also give it to you straight, she wouldn’t sugarcoat it.”
It was an approach that came in handy when dealing with frustrated parents of student-athletes, which often comes with being an athletic director.
‘A good listener’
Linda Ahern has been named the new athletic director for the Elizabethtown Area School District. (Photo courtesy of Elizabethtown Area School District)
Ahern “was a good listener,” Bill Templin said. “She made people feel like they were heard and valued.”
Templin had been Ahern’s assistant athletic director up until her retirement in March 2019, when Templin took over as athletic director. But Ahern remained on staff as a part-time game manager, working at various sporting events throughout the week.
“She did that for about a year and a half until the pandemic hit,” Templin said.
When the COVID-19 pandemic eased and spectators returned to sporting events, Ahern often could be found in the crowd at various Elizabethtown sporting events, sometimes ribbing Templin with pointers on how “I should be doing things differently, like where the chairs or garbage cans should be.”
But every interaction with Ahern also came with her asking how others and their families were doing.
“I hope that her legacy is that over the 40 years she was here she impacted the lives of students, athletes, staff members, even my own kids,” Templin said.
Ahern is survived by three children, now all adults who are thriving in professional careers, including daughter Jamie Ahern, a 31-year-old West Donegal Township resident who said she hopes her mother will be remembered for her “hard work, perseverance and dedication to the people and community she loved.”
It’s a community Linda Ahern supported to the very end by planning her own private celebration of life that was held after her death at Twisted Bine Beer Co. in Mount Joy Borough on Jan. 12. A husband of one of Ahern’s former colleagues owns the microbrewery.
“It was her way of giving back to the community one last time,” Jamie Ahern said.
Sensing the end coming near a few months ago, Linda Ahern expressed to friends a desire for one last walk through the halls of Elizabethtown High School.
She did so on an October afternoon alongside two former colleagues, one of them Spittal.
“Her enthusiasm for her job, the kids, the community and sports shined through,” Spittal said. “She was a role model on how to live your life. She was just a great person.”
