Coaches

Doctors aren’t high school coaches.  Doctors decide on your treatment, tell you to follow their instructions, then leave the rest to you.  They’re more like college professors – if you don’t want to come to class failure is your choice.   Although doctors want you to get better, at the end of the day they don’t have time to deal with patients who aren’t motivated.  High School coaches, however, are just the opposite, motivating you whether you like it or not 24-7.  On the field they watch every movement, drill you over and over, and bench you for poor performance.  Whether it was football or baseball practice I was always asking myself after windsprints, “why I am doing this?”   Coaches are relentless, they also spied on you off the field fading in and out of the shadows appearing from nowhere when you least expected it.  “How did he find out about the keg party at the boat launch?”  At the time coaches created a lot of hard work for me which I wouldn’t appreciate until far in the future.

When I think of great coaches, three come to mind.  Coach Tom Nicklas is a friend of mine in Goodland.  I never played sports for him, but he resembles my high school coaches, Tom Stricker and Jim Wells.  They are all similar, but different in a big way.   Today I raise a glass with Coach Nicklas all the time at The Crabby Lady Bar, but in high school the last person on earth I wanted to see glaring at me in the Burleigh House was Coach Stricker.  Decades have passed since I was coached by these guys at a time when they seemed much older and stricter.  Time, however, has compressed the age difference so now they’re younger and nicer.  But, just like physicians who I call Doctor, I still refer to both Jim Wells and Tom Stricker as Coach.  It’s not a formality, but a respect they earned and kept years ago.  One Thursday late in my senior year I got accepted into Notre Dame, without a doubt a big deal at a little school in a small rural town.  By Friday morning the word had gotten out so my friends swamped me with cheers and made plans for celebrating that night.  Late in the day Coach Wells cornered me in the gym to see if the rumor was true.  As I showed him the acceptance letter I noticed a different expression that I had never seen before even after winning big games.  It dawned on me then that coaches measure their own success not just on the field but in how their players tackle life after school.   

Although I had great role models, I’ve never formally coached a team of anyone.  When Diane was pregnant with Devin, however, she did have a sweatshirt made up for me with COACH printed across the front.  It was a joke between us about me coaching her through our Lamaze class.  Fortunately the epidural knocked out any chance for me to do any Lamaze coaching that Christmas morning or anytime after.  Recently, however,  I woke in a hospital room still wrestling with pain from another surgery the day before.   As the sun slowly creeped into the room it highlighted that my distant horizons were a lot closer than I realized.  Diane arrived not long after sunrise when I admitted to her for the first time ever,  “I am not doing this anymore.”   Instead of accepting my decision she hugged me tightly and said, “you’ve never given up before and you aren’t going to now; we’re fighting this together.”  Although I practice what I preach in defying odds; we all have our weak moments.  That day I absolutely needed a coach like Diane to push me back into the ring to ensure “I will” conquers “I won’t.”  Early on we definitely need coaches like Stricker, Wells, and Nicklas to keep us on the straight and narrow; but later on in life we discover the most important coach is the one sitting right next to us.  Slainte.