In praise of local coaches

[MAY 18, 2000]  How many times have you heard a local coach praised for his or her contributions to the school or to the community? When was the last time a coach was commended for all the extra hours that they put in on behalf of their athletes, for their programs or for their educational institutions?

More often than not, coaches seem more likely to be abused, yelled and cussed at, and of course, always second-guessed. Not too many people in the entire educational system are as maligned as the coaches are. If they let the kids have fun and teach a few fundamentals along the way, but don’t win; they’re let go. If they win, but inject too much discipline and require too much of the kids’ time, everybody’s mad and they’re either tolerated or fired. Coaches just can’t seem to win even when their teams are victorious.

I’d like to see that change. In fact, I’d like to be a part of the generation that enacted that change. The skeptical will say that our society has changed, and that’s just the culture that we live in. I don’t buy that. If we truly are the great community that we say we are, and I believe that we are, then it stands to reason that we have the power to produce positive change, at least at the local level.

What kind of change is needed? Well, for starters, why not heap some encouragement on our coaches instead of so much criticism?

I wonder how many of our loyal readers even realize how much time our area coaches put into their respective sports. Almost without exception, coaches in our county hold down full-time jobs at the same time that they are coaching their sport full-time. Oftentimes that means they must get up an hour or two early and stay up an hour or two later in order to get all of their work done. Most people never stop to consider the great sacrifice that coaches make in regard to their families. During the throes of the season, it is very difficult for most coaches to have any quality family time. In addition to all this, they must order the practice gear and the uniforms. Then, of course, they must do the laundry. Some sweep and mop the courts or help mow and line their fields. There is setup time and time to tear down. Some have to schedule their games and their officials. If they are lucky enough to have a quality athletic director, working with the good ones even adds a few hours of meetings and other activities.

While no one is a holding a gun to a coach’s head to make them use their time in this manner, do they have to be attacked verbally and sometimes physically for their efforts? I imagine that many people think that the reason coaches coach is for the money. If they knew how funny that was, they wouldn’t believe how ridiculous their thinking had been! So then, why do coaches make themselves and their families vulnerable to such a hostile environment? I believe it’s because they love the kids, the sport or the entire scene. They really believe that their efforts will make a difference.

As a sports fan why do I care? And maybe more importantly, as a grandparent or as a parent or as a taxpayer, why should you care? There are several reasons.

One is that there may not be a more influential person in our children’s lives than their coach! Who spends the most time with our kids in any given week? Is it their parents, their teachers, their pastors or their coaches? The coach has an incredible opportunity and responsibility to be a mentor in a kid’s life. A coach can be an encourager, and facilitate and enhance growth, responsibility and maturity in his or her players. Some coaches are even surrogate parents for those kids who may have lost a parent or live as if they had.

Another reason to care is that today’s coaches are helping to shape kids’ minds and leadership abilities. With this being an election year, I am amazed at how many candidates have brought up their athletic careers in their speeches. Several of them have stated that most of their leadership skills were a result of participating in individual and team sports. Who do you think taught those candidates? It was coaches, that's who!

An environment must be created and maintained that allows a coach to be encouraged rather than maliciously attacked at every turn.

Believe me when I say that I do understand the passion of the fans and the parents. As we watched our nephew go from junior high to high school sports, we saw the good and the bad. We wanted him to play every minute of every game and we wanted his teams to all go undefeated. That didn’t happen for him. Some of his teammates’ parents berated the coaches. I’m not sure that accomplished anything.

(To top of second column)

I once had a parent call me at 6:00 on a Sunday morning to tell me how much better my college team would have been if I would have played his son more. That season our record was 24-6, and we were the #1 ranked small college team in the nation in our division. His son hadn’t even practiced or played the whole first semester. At any rate, I don’t think we would have been much more successful. The only player that may have prevented those six losses would have been…Michael Jordan! I learned an important lesson from that phone call…perception and reality are far from compatible.

I have seen that in our area sports teams as well. Most of us do not know our own coach’s philosophy on coaching their particular sport. Most of us do not go to the daily practices, and so we don’t know who’s getting it done on a daily basis out there. We have basically little to no idea what a particular team’s chemistry or personality is. But come game time we all have an opinion of who should play and who should be benched.

Sometimes we forget that the players on these teams are just kids. Yelling and screaming at them from the stands should never be tolerated! And when coaches are verbally abused to the extent that they are today in those same settings, we are setting the stage for even more damage!

Coaches are also ambassadors. They represent our teams, our schools and our towns. When stress and pressure our heaped on them, does that allow them to be our best envoys?

I really did not want to get on a soapbox here. What I really wanted to do was to make people think and to be a positive discussion starter.

Actually, I wanted to do more than that. I would like to launch the largest write-in campaign that our area has ever seen. I'm calling on area fans to bombard coaches with notes, cards, e-mails and letters in support of the awesome jobs that they do. In my column this week, I’m including the addresses of our local schools, right out of the phone book, so that you might write a note of encouragement to your school’s coaches. They don’t know anything about this. I hope they are sitting down when they receive your letters.

And for all of our loyal readers who scoff at encouragement and still consider bashing coaches a constitutional right protected by the Bill of Rights, we have a little something for you as well. If you are upset or unhappy with your local coach, I’m presenting this one-time offer…you can take it out on me. Just write me here:

c/o LDN

601 Keokuk Street

Lincoln, IL 62656

That’s all you gotta do. And if anyone writes their local coach and sends us a copy of the letter, as long as it meets the LDN requirements, we will print it here as well.

As for me personally, I have a high regard for all of our coaches. I know firsthand the commitments and sacrifices that they make, and I respect them for it.

I’m not a mayor or a governor (although I’d love to play one on television) but I’m proclaiming this…Encourage our Coaches Week! I hope that you will take the time to send a short note of encouragement to your local coach(es). Thank them for their time, energy and efforts that they put forth for our sons and daughters. Thank them for the many sacrifices that they make so that we can have teams and games, and just be entertained. Thank them for representing our schools and our communities.

You will be glad that you took the time to thank them. They will be shocked…but it will go a long way in placing the coaching profession back to the level it needs to be.

Area coaches…on behalf of the LDN, I take my hat off to you. Nice going…and keep up the good work!

[Jeff Mayfield]  

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