“Stop looking at birds and airplanes and concentrate on golf.” I have heard that more times than I care to remember from my beleaguered friend, John, who believes that the goal of golf is to play well. I can’t fault him too much when I point out a gigantic C-17 Globemaster cargo plane and then dig my faithless five iron into the ground three inches behind the ball. I have even switched to neon green golf balls to help me focus but to no avail. I am still the seven-year-old who stood in right field catching grasshoppers as the baseball rolled by on the way to someone’s home run. ADD runs in my family like Guiness in a Dublin pub.
Oh yeah. This was going to be about coaches. You may think I am ill-equipped to write about the people who tried their best to get me to practice on a regular basis so I could jump higher, run faster, and shoot better. I was un-coachable not because I thought I knew better but because my brain was always in left field when I was on first base. Considering the frustration level, most of the coaches I knew were remarkably patient with me.
The coaches I grew up with are leaving us at an alarming rate. Jim Shannon, Bill Banks, Zeke Neal and others whose names have faded with my diminishing brain cell count, were the first to try to mold my age group into athletes. Beginning with the Springs Recreation “Midget” basketball league, they spent their Saturday mornings in a noisy gym full of barely civilized boys and girls from about nine to twelve years old. Practices were held on the half-courts in the monolithic Fort Mill High gym.
With the accordion bleachers pushed back against the walls, four baskets folded down from the ceiling to create two of what we called cross-courts. Often practices were held with teams working out on those four backboards and the two regular backboards. Getting hit with a ball from another team was an avocational hazard.
For practice games, teams would play on each of the two cross courts at the same time often with girls’ teams on one court and boys’ teams on the other. By the time I was twelve or thirteen, my focus was often on the other court. Bill Banks was, I believe, the first coach I had a chance to disappoint. I was an early bloomer. In the eighth grade I was six-one and my basketball career, to the outside observer, looked promising. Bill Banks tried to instill the basics and worked with me at center teaching me to pivot, to shoot a hook shot and to rebound. I was pretty good at rebounding having a five or six-inch height advantage over my peers. Shooting and dribbling eluded me and my free-throw percentage was abysmal. The other players soon grew up to match my growth spurt and while I was on the basketball team all through high school, I was also on the bench all through high school.
Football was different. I was only on the bench two years. For some reason, I was put at defensive end…I think Bob Jones wanted to toughen me up. One day at practice, he was impressed when a sweep to the left was shut down and the runner was stopped in the backfield. “That’s what I mean! Good job! Hill.” Only, it wasn’t Hill. I was on the sidelines just behind the coaches. Kenneth McKinney, a real player, had replaced me on the line and I had to tell Coach about his mistake. Eventually, having seen the light and more than my share of stars, I decided to spend my junior and senior years watching from the grandstand.
Good coaches can have a lifelong influence. My father began his football years at Union High School in Union South Carolina. His parents both worked in the mills and Dad was the surprise baby in the family. His brothers were 16 and 10 when he was born. Though he was bright and loved to read, he was not an exceptional student. He was big for his age at 6’1”, 220 pounds and the Union High School coach, Coach Floyd, took an interest in him. When Dad wrote and delivered a speech for one of his classmates in a school election, Coach Floyd told him he was an exceptional speaker and could go to college if he would get his grades in good order. There was not much hope of college. His parents could never afford the cost and scholarships were not as available as they are today.
Because of mill closings, Dad’s life changed abruptly after his junior year. His family had to move to Fort Mill where there was a job available for his father. Both the the football skills and the confidence in his speaking ability carried Dad through the move. He was elected President of Fort Mill’s Senior Class during his first year of attendance. By the time he graduated, WWII was raging and he joined the Marine Corps.
On his return he considered going to college on the GI bill but decided to raise his family instead. All his life he was asked to speak for meeting after meeting. He was cool and funny and always a hit. I knew who Coach Floyd was from my earliest years because Dad credited him for a great part of his success. At age 80, when he got his first computer, Dad used Coach Floyd as part of his password.
On the college and pro levels, coaches work with gifted athletes and hone their considerable skills. Coaching middle school and high school presents a tougher challenge. Many high school students walk into gym class with no motivation to become star athletes. They are in gym class because it is required and the gym teacher/coach is tasked with helping students to develop coordination, teamwork skills and a healthy attitude toward fitness.
For my generation, un-enlightened as it was, as un-woke as it was, the great motivator was Dodge Ball. It is in dodge ball that we first learn that everybody doesn’t love us and that those who don’t love us always seem to be holding the big red ball.
Whenever we think of sports, we cannot help but think of losers and winners. Every coach has to face the prospect of bad years and learn to motivate dejected players through disappointment. The ability to lift a team’s spirit through adversity is one of the toughest jobs in sports. I have al
ways felt sorry for the coach of the Washington Nationals. Who are they? They are a professional team full of players who are NBA quality but who travel from town to town as the opposing team for the Harlem Globe Trotters. While they do occasionally win, their job is to be the butt of stunt after stunt…to be fooled nightly, to suffer the fate of the perpetual underdog.
The best coaches can sometimes make winners from losers. Witness the St. Peter’s University Peacocks, who shocked team after team to reach college basketball’s Elite Eight in 2022. In his first year of coaching, head coach Bashir Mason took a team of pretty good players and led them to greatness. His team, from a school with under 3000 students, took on and defeated some of the most highly rated teams in the nation.
Talent, confidence and good coaching can make lightning strike. They can also make Rich Strike, winner of the 2022 Kentucky Derby. Bought at auction for $30,000 dollars, getting a slot in the Derby because another horse was scratched, and running from the last gate at 80 -1 odds, he went from an unknown to world-wide celebrity in just over two minutes.
As student and teacher, I admired the coaches who worked to improve me and later, the ones I worked alongside when teaching high school. The best were able to inspire greatness in the good athletes and to instill a little pride into those of us who would forever finish well back in the pack. I admit to a little jealousy about the admiration some of my students had for their coaches. I witnessed students coming back year after year to thank Coach Jim Walser, Coach Gus Allen, Coach Eddie Weldon, Coach Sue Meisenheimer and Coach Wille Ware along with many others for their success in life.
Because I am a big guy, often during my teaching career, a new student would mistakenly call me “Coach” and I would explain the mistake. There was an exception. One student, after half a year, raised his hand to ask a question and began with “Coach Hill,…”. I started in with my usual denial when he said, “You coach English, don’t you?”
From then on, he called me Coach and every time he did, I think I beamed just a little.
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