DIARY OF A MAD FOOTBALL COACH, PART 2

At the end of Part 1, the Mites football team I was coaching was 0-4. The head coach had just told me that from now on, we had to operate under a different set of rules. The parents, smelling blood in the water, were complaining behind the coaches’ backs. The guy who runs the football program for the town laid it out for us: No more raising our voices. No more making them run laps or do grass drills for screwing around. As far as coaching was concerned, the gloves were off, but they were replaced with Socker-Boppers.

Now thoroughly demoralized, the other coaches and I spent that practice and the subsequent days moping through the workouts, mumbling barely audible but positive and nurturing comments like “Yeah…way to go, fellas…that’s how to get…get, um…fired up…” Overnight we’d been transformed from an enthusiastic group of volunteers, giving our time and effort to help kids learn to achieve great things on the football field, into a apathetic bunch of sullen Registry workers.

I guess I have myself to blame. The week before, we were having a lousy practice. The players were doing nothing during the plays and screwing around after the whistle. So I snapped. I’m always careful not to single out any one kid, so this time I let the whole group have it. “You’re 0-3!” I yelled, “but you’re acting like you’re heading for the Super Bowl!!!” I told them I was looking for kids who were serious about playing football. And if I could only find nine, then I’ll play our next game nine-on-eleven. Everyone else who just wants to goof off can go to the playground instead.

Pretty tame stuff, I thought. And I believed it worked; that I’d lit a proverbial fire under their metaphoric butts. The next four or five plays were excellent, and I lavished the team with praise after each one. I don’t remember exactly, but I imagine that after that, I stood there on the field afterwards, pretty satisfied with myself. I probably had some inner dialogue going along the lines of “Ya done good, Thornton. You sure are a guy that really knows how to get the most out of his players. What a great, great coach.” Or something like that.

I realize now that to the parents on the sidelines, it must have looked like I had gone completely daffy. What should have been a Knute Rockne moment looked more to them like Clark Griswold’s meltdown when his Christmas bonus turned out to be the “Jelly of the Month Club.”

That might have been the moment that put the parents over the edge. Among the complaints was that some of the coaches swore in front of the kids, and I agree with the parents on this one. Personally, I never did it. And it’s not like those who did were strafing the kids with f-bombs, but occasionally a PG-13 word would slip through the filter.

First, swearing in front of nine-year-olds is morally, objectively wrong. Secondly, once you break the swear barrier, you immediately lose whatever point you were trying to make. One time a kid was complaining that the kid he was blocking was grabbing him, and the refs weren’t calling it. So one coach told the team, “Look, if some kid was holding me, instead of complaining to my coach about it, I’d get mad. I’d knock the kid on his…his…ass!” So every kid listening immediately turned to the kid next to him and giggled, “He said ‘ass’!” With kids, the swear is all they hear. It’s like that old “Far Side” cartoon where the guy is yelling at his dog, “Bad dog, Ginger! That was naughty, Ginger!” and all the dog hears is “Blah blah, Ginger! Blah blah blah-blah, Ginger!”

The next shoe to drop was the wild, bug-eyed, over-the-top panic caused by the EEE Virus. One mother complained that she got a mosquito bite during practice, and the kids were in danger. (You may remember the streets piled high with the corpses of the victims of that dreaded pandemic.) The mosquito being a very punctual insect, all our practices had to end by 5PM. Since most of the other parents and all of the coaches have these things known as “jobs,” we had as many attendees as a screening of “The Weatherman.”

But it didn’t bother me. I was exploring whole new levels of “Who Gives a Crap?” If a handful of parents and the people in charge could turn us into the world’s only nine year-old Tee-Ball team, so be it. If this was the thanks I get for all the nights of taking time off from work and missing out on dinner with my family, that was fine with me. I was now officially doing this only for laughs.

But then the damnedest thing happened. The kids started playing better. We actually won a game. A shutout. The “Nanny 911” approach was working.

Now that we’d finally had a breakthrough, naturally, some of the coaches wanted to make changes. They wanted to completely revamp a defense I’d put together, now that it was working. That included benching one of my best players. No longer in the business of caring, I let them. When the kid came to me upset and asking what he did wrong, I saw it as a chance to impart some wisdom on the young lad. I told him that with any endeavor, there are two kinds of satisfaction. The first one comes from being successful. The other comes from watching the failure of others. Victory cigars taste great, but they’re not as satisfying as watching someone else’s cigar explode in their face. Before our next game, I asked the kid to join me in watching the debacle unfold. By halftime we were down 20-0. In the second half, that kid and my defense were back on the field and we weren’t scored on again. Good times.

Still, none of us coaches could deny that the team was playing better since we pulled back, eased up on them, and treated them like kids. The parents’ approach worked. We won our last game, and made it into the playoffs. We lost by three TDs in the playoff game, but like any football game, a handful of plays here or there could have won it for us. You always hear pro and college coaches say that there are no moral victories. But youth sports are full of them. Making the playoffs under tough circumstances was total moral victory, and we told our kids they had every reason to be proud.

In “Patton,” the General almost gets court-martialed for slapping a soldier. After the war, Omar Bradley tells Patton he thinks that soldier did more to win the war than any private in the Army. It’s possible one mother saved our season. Or one mosquito.