Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
Coaches get the attention, too often hostile and negative, but in the background is often a long-suffering wife who shares the pain. I had the privilege of coaching with perhaps the best coach-and-wife team I’ve ever known as a young married coach in the mid-1980s.
Chuck showed me the trunk once back in 1987. Inside were shirts, shorts, caps, and other paraphernalia from a lifetime of coaching football, basketball, and track.
Yvonne was in the other room, feeding a 20-something team of high school boys spaghetti at a team dinner.
The kids were arranged on the floor, at the kitchen table, on the couch, and nearly any other open spot in their home north of Shoshoni.
Chuck Wells was a coach, pure and simple. Yvonne was the epitome of a coach’s wife. She took everything in stride with a kind demeanor, an easy smile, and a grace that is hard to define.
That trunk contained the insanity of a life devoted to making the next place a little better than they found it, then moving on.
Chuck started coaching at St. Stephen’s back in 1963, but before he was done, he’d mentored boys and girls in 22 different schools. Each time they moved, Chuck took a new challenge, but Yvonne packed the kids, the dishes, the furniture, and restarted their lives and the lives of their four boys and daughter. It’s often the story with many young coaching families.
Thankfully, I didn’t put Sue through that ordeal, but I was tempted along the way to take a job here and there. In the end, it was Lusk and a couple of homes in Riverton. I did change jobs a lot, but in Fremont County, you can do that pretty easily if you’re willing to drive a little bit.
Friday marks our 44th anniversary. We met on a Wednesday in May of 1981 and were engaged four days later. Yep, it was the best decision I ever made.
She never planned on being a coach’s wife. She grew up in a family totally uninterested in anything athletic. If they weren’t working, they were taking turns playing the piano and singing. Enter into this little world the young football, basketball, and track coach from a farm near Pavillion.
Yes, they were city folk as well. Sue still describes herself as a city girl from Lusk. For those of you who don’t know that wonderful little town, it’s about as big a ranching community as you can find anywhere.
Chuck had 28 assistant coaches on staff from freshman through varsity level as head coach at Bolsa Grande, California. That’s a lot of people for a high school of 2000 students. Texas football gets the national attention as the hotspot of prep football, but more players reach the college ranks from the Golden State than the Lone Star State every season.
Yvonne told me with a note of sadness in her voice that every one of the married coaches on Chuck’s staff was divorced within a couple of years.
The toll, time away, and distractions are just too much for many young marriages.
It’s one of the burdens of being a coach’s wife, but it’s far from the only one.
Coaches by nature are thick-skinned, stiff-necked guys that don’t cave in to outside influences. If you listened to every snowplow parent trying to screw over every other kid so their own gets a better chance, you wouldn’t be much of a coach.
So the comments flow in the stands on Friday and Saturday nights. Coaches consider the source, but their wives hear the comments and it is painful. In our entitled society, it’s perfectly fine for some people to run down, second-guess, and ridicule everything the coach says or does.
After all, kids win the game; coaches just lose games.
With social media, it’s only gotten worse, ridiculous in fact. These keyboard warriors can malign, slam, slander, and defame a coach with seeming immunity. You won’t see many administrators or school boards jumping to the aid of the coach; it’s just not done.
When I started, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it is today. Sue went to the games I coached in Lusk, Riverton, and Shoshoni, and enjoyed them in the early years.
Later on, going to the game consisted of getting a pair of active toddlers into car seats, keeping Brian in check at games while trying to pay attention to what was happening on the floor and field.
When discussing the game later, I’d ask simple questions like, “Did you notice we made a little run when I put the boys in that half-court trap?” or “That turned out to be a good call to throw on first down.”
Sue rarely answered because she had not noticed. She was too busy chasing Brian from under the bleachers or finding Staci after a couple of high school girls asked if they could hold her and then disappeared.
She was watching the game from a different dimension than I was on the sidelines.
That’s how it is for the wife of a coach. There are so many things to take care of if you have small children, and even more if your own children are on the floor with your husband calling the shots. It isn’t easy.
I’m proud to say that the coaches of the teams I cover are my friends. Parents who sometimes call me to badmouth their local high school coach find out quickly that I always side with the coach.
In the process, I’ve gotten to know their wives as well. Most are at least a generation younger than me, but the situations are the same. I understand what their wives are going through, because mine, and those wives of friends I coached with and against at the same age, had to endure it as well.
Before you decide to yell something stupid, derogatory, or simply ignorant from your vantage point in the stands towards the coach, take a moment to think about what effect you’re going to have.
You aren’t going to help your son or daughter. You will embarrass them, make the game harder for your child and distance them from the rest of the team. At the same time, you’re going to hurt the coach’s wife.
The coach already knows you’re an idiot; he doesn’t need further proof. His wife should not have to put up with your comments.
It’s difficult being the wife of a coach who leaves in the pre-dawn darkness, arrives home after 7 p.m. each night, is gone every Friday and Saturday, and then spends all day Sunday reviewing game film before starting the process again early Monday morning. It’s even more difficult for her to have to listen to the inane comments.
If you have a positive thing to say that will help the program, not just your own child, then bring it to the coach sometime away from the game or practice. He’ll listen, every coach looks for all the edge they can find, maybe you have something that will help his program.
In the interim, women like Yvonne are saints. They do so many unheralded things that allow their husbands to succeed.
The wife of a coach is a special profession that few can handle with grace, style, and diligence. They are the bedrock behind the face of the program.