Coaches

I attended two basketball games and two squash matches this weekend. All at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Only one ended up on the plus side for my alma mater. Yet it was enjoyable to be there. 

F&M plays big time squash. The squash courts of my days on campus have been converted into offices and meeting rooms. Now they are brightly lit in an area we knew as “The Pit,” a dank, dusty small dirt area where the spring teams used to practice, at its best when the dirt was softened by watering or at its worst when dry or muddied. 

I have many memories burned in my brain in that dimly lit part of the bowels of Mayser Center, the hub of F&M indoor sports. My Bobby Murcer bat was broken on the first swing in batting practice. Catching various pitchers left with me with assorted bruises, as I was the emergency catcher. And running sprints was pure hell with all the junk which circulated in that cold environment. 

It was a revelation to see the beautiful home of F&M Squash. Large pennants adorn the walls over the more than modest seating area by the courts. With the old windows overlooking the expanse, one can also get a birds eye view of the matches. There are modern scoreboards for each court and an array of stationary bicycles for the players to warm up their legs before and after the matches. 

What got me thinking about today’s topic arose from the basketball games. Seated seven rows behind the F&M bench, I was able to observe all of the coaching staffs in action. 

Plus in the stands was the legendary Glenn Robinson, whose name is painted on the floor at Mayser, a tribute to the man who has won the most games at the Division III level, and whose teams made five Final Fours, with banners flanking the wall by the main scoreboard. Many of his players made All-American status, and there is a listing of those individuals on another banner; Chris Finch, the head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves, has his name on that piece of cloth. 

My observations in this blog are about coaches. Whether we have played sports or watched games, coaches are omnipresent. For good reason. To make the players better and to try to bring success with their individual and collective actions. 

Most of the coaches cajole and yell in some fashion in an attempt to motivate their players. Others use sidebar methods of getting their less than subtle messages across. 

For some, they are highly successful. Of course, that depends on the receptivity of the players and their innate athletic ability to execute the game plan in the heat of competition. 

Styles and approaches vary. Almost every coach competed at some level. In the path to their latest stop, they have been influenced greatly by a number of leaders—both positively and negatively. 

Additionally, a coach is a salesperson. They have to sell the product to the player—and the families of those players too. There is a whole lot which goes into that piece to close the deal. 

We also hear many call coaches “teachers.” For many, especially at the secondary school level, they are in an actual classroom, working from a curriculum, addressing a wide array of individuals.  The ability to connect with students can be transferred to the playing fields in some degree. 

We lionize the ones most successful at their craft. And we castigate and fire those who fail at delivering victories. Bill Belichick, who recently left the New England Patriots after a couple of down years, has been lauded as the greatest coach ever in the National Football League for his teams’ six Super Bowl wins. Nick Saban, who recently retired from coaching after a journey which included stops at Michigan State, LSU, and an unsuccessful foray in the pros with the Miami Dolphins before landing at Alabama for the past 17 season, is widely considered to have been the greatest college football coach of all time based upon the winning so many national titles.

Walking through New York’s Penn Station on Sunday, I encountered a large sign promoting St. John’s basketball as the city’s college basketball team, probably due to its membership in the Big East Conference, a high level Division I group. What stood out besides the backdrop of the city was that St. John’s was promoting two Hall of Fame coaches—the gesticulating Lou Carnesecca and the mercurial current head man, Rick Pitino, who has won national titles at Kentucky, Louisville and did a stint as coach of the Knicks. 

The goal was to sell tickets for games at the arena above the station, Madison Square Garden. It had little to do with academics. St. John’s is not comparable to Princeton, where Mitch Henderson, the current coach at that institution, is an alumnus and judging by his successful teams, evidently knows how to reach his student-athletes who are potentially on a different academic level from St. John’s or most other schools.

Look at the recent managers of the New York Yankees. Both Joe Girardi and Aaron Boone are college graduates—Girardi from Northwestern and Boone from USC. While Boone hasn’t won a World Series like the former Yankees catcher, his laid back approach to the players was what was desired as opposed to the hardness of Girardi. No one questioned their fierce desire to win; it was a matter of how to reach the modern player which mattered. That was further demonstrated when Girardi was summarily fired mid-season in Philadelphia. 

I read a book about the legendary football coach, Paul “Bear” Bryant. The Junction Boys was an expose about the cruelty of the man at Texas A&M and how he brutally molded a team into a winning squad under incredibly horrible conditions in the hot Texas heat and humidity. It mortified me. 

Vince Lombardi became the head man at Green Bay. Clips of his style of yelling and cursing out his players have been replayed repeatedly. As have the rims showing his players carrying Lombardi off the field after triumphs in the NFL Championship and the Super Bowl. 

Fans and sportswriters adored the scholarly Lombardi, a graduate of St. Cecilia High School in Kearney, New Jersey and Fordham University, where he starred as one of the mythical “Seven Blocks of Granite.” Yet he employed and extolled toughness as a necessary evil. 

Contrasted with the cerebral, sarcastic nature of Phil Jackson dealing with superstars egos on the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers. Or how William “Red” Holtzman used his Brooklyn/CCNY smarts to reach a collective group of exceptionally intelligent basketball 

players on New York Knicks championship teams of 1970 and 1973.

My exposure to coaches began early when I would ride my bicycle to watch the high school football team practice and play. I became a favorite of the head coach who let me play as an undersized freshman but mercifully led me to become the statistician for the team and be allowed to attend Sunday morning prep sessions for the next game and have a doughnut as my reward for delivering extensive statistics from the previous day’s contest. 

There, like in basketball, where I was the manager and scorekeeper, I observed a calmer, more focused demeanor off the playing surface, designed to select strategies most likely to result in wins. Which they largely did. But neither man was above screaming at players for mistakes made or to light a fire under the individual to perform better. 

One early baseball coach I had would not let me swing at the first strike. Which always looked so tantalizing. I got my first freshman and first varsity hits on the first pitch I saw. Because my coaches encouraged me to swing the bat. 

With cable TV, we now have access to NFL locker rooms and coaches like we never did before. This season we saw Robert Saleh and the New York Jets in training camp. Ivy Leaguer Mike Mc Daniel and his Miami Dolphins were the focus of the in season Hard Knocks. Two different coaches employing two different styles of leadership. 

The way sports is, coaches are a necessary evil. How we see them is determined by a prism and what shades we want to use. Boston Celtics Head Coach Arnold “Red” Auerbach was a pure S.O.B. Yet his players would run through a wall for him. Jets head man Rich Kotite could never garner the respect of his team, which led to the worst record in franchise history and his subsequent departure from his chosen profession. 

Watching the four coaches on the basketball floor, I saw four different approaches. There was more yelling from the male Muhlenberg women’s coach. His female counterpart seemed lost in strategy, perhaps trying to impart something late to a losing team in another losing game.

The men’s coach at Muhlenberg was more of an exhorter than the F&M coach, who was quiet, yet his demeanor and side comments to his assistants and players showed a different side of his methods. 

Glenn Robinson sat in the stands on Saturday, making a rare appearance since his retirement. He was a screamer on the sidelines, an obvious harsh taskmaster who worked towards perfection as much as possible. Which made his teams quite good. 

What struck me on this Basketball Alumni Day were the throngs of his former players who came back to campus. All gleeful and remaining, hugging the coach’s wife and chatting with her as well. 

Whatever his way of doing things was, his boys, now grown men with families, were  drawn back, happy to see their mentor. It was rewarding to see how the coach-player dynamic can create such relationships. In this instance.

I can go on and on about coaches, citing individual after individual I have seen over the years. Whether it was religious men molding players or stars like Deion Sanders who sold their personalities. There are too many to relate in in this short a session. 

But that is what motivated me today. To write about them. They must have had a lasting impact on me. Coaches.