Soccer coach and teacher Matt White has taught at several schools including PHS and Emerald Ridge. White currently teaches AP Psychology and AP Government and coaches both boys and girls soccer.

White has been a coach for 26 years, starting in 1988 and has been teaching AP classes since 1996 when he started teaching AP Government at Emerald Ridge. Afterward, he taught the first AP Psychology class in the Puyallup School District.

“I was the only one who had experience teaching AP anything. I had taught AP Psychology for five years before I came here. I started teaching AP Government because the class needed to be offered and I was the only one with experience teaching AP at Emerald Ridge,” White said. “So then [the school] created AP Psychology and that did not exist in the district at all. I was the first person in the district to teach AP Psychology. Now AP psychology exists at all three high schools and AP government exists at all three high schools.”

White describes what lead him to become a teacher.

“I think that I have been given a lot of gifts and I do not think that when you have been given gifts you take those things and you hide in your big house with your three cars and your gated community,” White said. “I think your job is, if you have gifts, you are supposed to use them — like Superman — make the world safer and better. I figured that this was an opportunity, that this was something I could do to serve others with those gifts that I had.”