Viking Coach

Mike McFeely, The Forum
Published Sunday, April 15, 2007

HELP WANTED: High school coach. Candidates must have four-year college degree, at least two years of coaching experience at the high school level, skin as thick as tree bark, willingness to be stabbed in the back by the meddling parents of the players you coach and the tranquil restraint of Gandhi to not punch those same parents in the beak when they accuse you of a) not playing their kid enough, b) not playing their kid properly or c) not winning every game during the length of their kid’s career. Success is not a guarantee of job security. Pay is equal to $2.17 an hour, less if you take into account time spent talking to dads who think their kid would be getting college scholarship offers by now if you weren’t such an idiot. Good opportunity for a young coach not yet embittered by years of know-it-all parents. Applications will be taken until May 1, or until we find somebody dumb enough to take the position.

Would you answer that ad? Would anybody answer that ad? Perhaps the better the question is why would anybody answer it?
It is that time of the year when, after a long and cold winter of discontent among overzealous dads and moms, high school coaches’ heads are rolling. Or the coaches are sticking their own necks in the guillotine, tired of dealing with shenanigans.
Last week, longtime Wahpeton boys basketball coach John Del Val was ousted by the school board after a group of parents grumbled. In Kindred, girls basketball coach Waylan Starr resigned because he sensed he didn’t have the support of parents. There are rumblings in other towns – including one that begins with “M” and is nuts about hockey – that winning coaches are catching flak.

The kicker with Del Val and Starr is that they were successful. That’s particularly true of Starr, who in two seasons won 85 percent of the time and advanced to a pair of North Dakota Class B state tournaments.
In Kindred, apparently, if you ain’t winning nine of 10, you ain’t winning.

My question is this: Are we going to reach a point in high school sports where bright young kids, scared off by the horror stories, don’t want to coach?

To put a twist on an old saw, you can only kick a coach so many times before he stops coming around.
After talking with several high school types, it seems most didn’t believe that was going to be a problem. Like beat-up old sports columnists, maybe they’re used to shrugging off the salvos.

But Wahpeton athletic director Mike McCall, perhaps tainted by a tough week of dealing with the Del Val situation, offered a different take.

“I think eventually coaching could become like officiating. We don’t have a lot of new officials coming out and not a lot of people want to get into it because of the grief they take and the situations they are put into,” McCall said. “I think we could find ourselves in a position where we could be facing a shortage of coaches.”

An alarmist’s view? Possibly. But you can’t blame McCall after he watched a competent veteran coach submarined like somebody who went 0-20.