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.
“The greatest innovation in coaching is called ID,” nine-time state champion football coach Don Julian once said. The winner of five Class 4-A titles in Sheridan, and four more Class 3-A titles in Riverton was right.
Irate parents aren’t as “brave” as they once were with threatening, early morning phone calls followed by a quick hangup before the coach could identify their voice. Now, they sink to complaining on social media, sending threatening texts or emails, but most often direct their complaints to school administrators or, in the case of small schools, board members.
There is an annoying side to coaching young men and women at the high school level. It’s not usually the kids; they’re rarely the problem, but instead, the bruised egos of their overzealous parents.
It didn’t happen very often when I first started teaching and coaching. I only had a couple of encounters with parents in Lusk early in my career.
Once, was as a classroom teacher, where a kid who specialized in detention was failing my history class. I wouldn’t budge on his grade when his father came in to complain that if I didn’t give him a D, he wouldn’t be able to wrestle at the regional tournament.
The apple didn’t fall far from the tree with this pair. Nope, he can do the work, or he can sit.
Predictably, the father went to the principal and superintendent, who quickly backed him. I still wouldn’t budge (I didn’t get tenure that year either).
The old man dropped by my room one day to let me know he’d called Jerry Spence and was going to sue me for not passing his son.
“Go ahead, does he need the WEA attorney’s phone number,” was all I said.
No suit from Jerry came, but the kid did spend the next week doing assignments and was eligible by the Thursday before the regional competition with a D.
Another father was irate that I was pitching his son in a Babe Ruth game against Douglas. Lusk had three Babe Ruth teams, and as a 25-year-old bachelor, I’d volunteered to coach one of the teams.
We played teams from Douglas and Torrington throughout the summer so we didn’t have to play the same two squads week after week.
It was this boy’s turn to pitch, and we were playing a good Douglas team.
“You can’t pitch him against Douglas,” the father said. “It will ruin his ERA.”
I thought he was joking and started to laugh; it just added fuel to the man’s anger.
Realizing he was serious I said, “He’ll either pitch, or you can take him home and he’s off the team.”
We had a saloon-style gate behind the backstop. We opened the top gate to pass balls to the umpire. The upper gate was open, and I was talking to the father through it.
He reached through and grabbed me by the collar. I punched him square in the nose, driving him back. He came at me again and I swung the gate into his forehead, dropping him like a sack of potatoes.
A Niobrara County Deputy Sheriff was watching the whole thing and came up.
“Am I in trouble?” I asked.
“No, you were justified, I’ll haul his drunken a** home,” the deputy said.
It was the last fight I was ever involved in.
We had some late arrivals back in Lusk from games in Saratoga, Hanna, Burns, and Pine Bluffs and track meets in Cheyenne, Casper, Upton and Buffalo but we never had to wait for parents to pick up the kids. They either drove, walked home or mom or dad was waiting in the parking lot.
That changed when I coached the sophomore boys’ basketball team in Riverton. As the lower-level coach, it was one of my duties to wait until all the kids had been picked up.
Inevitably, a small group of kids were always waiting for their parents to arrive well after we had returned.
I noticed a trend. Certain parents never made it before 1:30 AM and often not until 2. That’s when the bars closed. Impressed by their parenting skills I was not.
Well before caller ID, I’d sometimes get calls at 2 or 3 AM, followed by a quick hangup when I picked up the receiver.
One night, a drunk who worked at the school where I coached, and who had a son on the team, called me at 2:30 AM. He cursed at me for a few seconds, then hung up, but I recognized his voice.
I ran downstairs, picked up the phone book, and called him back. The idiot answered.
My message was brief, “If you ever call me like this again, I’m going to kick your a** in front of God and everybody and your boy will never play another minute.” Problem solved.
Problem solved for me, but not for the boy or girl who has to live with this type of behavior. I made it a point to never take it out on the kids, they were dealing with enough at home already.
Coaches tell me this sort of thing is still going on, but now it’s page after page-length texts and emails complaining how the coach is ruining their child and how they’re going to the next board meeting to get them fired. Yawn…it never changes.
Even when a team is winning, it’s not good enough unless little Jimmy or Nancy gets to be the star.
The rise of social media has just made it worse as snowplow parents take to the Internet to spread their idiocy. It never helps the program, it never helps the coach, and it never helps their child, but they can’t quit.
Lately, I’ve been getting a little flak from these same parents, never on social media but in Facebook messages where they complain about other kids on the team.
Without deviation, these texts all arrive late Friday night or early Saturday morning, back to the future with the bar crowd.
From the context, you can tell they’re inebriated, and liquid courage has emboldened them to contact me.
Every instance involves coverage of another player on the team, or of the coverage another more successful team than the one their kid is on is getting. Jealousy with a capital “J” and it only gets worse with each passing year.
You hear parents claim their child is “skipping” college to go straight to professional, (basketball, baseball, soccer…fill in the blank) when they’re average on their best day.
The latest was a new one. A guy was angry that a story on a fundraiser for Shoshoni wrestlers going to a national tournament used the word “earned” in reference to their chance to compete.
Anytime a Fremont County athlete has the chance to compete on a bigger stage, I’m all for it and I’ll write a promo to help them get a fundraiser going if needed every time. If it agitates your pettiness, too bad.
I removed the word “earned,” but the Wranglers are still going. Your mission was accomplished.
Here are the kids going to the tournament from Shoshoni and a link to donate to their cause.
Ignorance is bliss, but ignoring it is an art.