The Coach is Everything
by Steve McGill
Recently I gave the students in my Creative Writing class two prompts, and told them to write for about 15 minutes for each. For the first prompt, I told them to write about someone who has been a heroic figure in their lives. For the second prompt, I instructed them to write about someone who has been an antagonistic figure in their lives. Instead of sitting there bored waiting for them to finish, I decided to go ahead and respond to the prompt myself. After we wrote, some of the students read their paragraphs aloud to the class. In almost every case, regardless of whether the students read aloud their paragraph about a hero or a villain, the person they wrote about was an authority figure in their lives — a teacher or a coach. That was true for mine as well.
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For the heroic figure, I wrote about Mr. Keeley, my track coach my last two years of high school. For my antagonistic figure, I wrote about Mr. McCarry, one of the assistant basketball coaches during my first two years of high school. Mr. Keeley was one of the main reasons that I enjoyed running track and fell in love with the hurdles. Mr. McCarry was one of the main reasons I became disillusioned with playing basketball and eventually quit.
In writing about Mr. Keeley, I focused on a specific incident, from my senior year, when he boosted my confidence after I had run a very disappointing race late in the outdoor season. The incident occurred during a dual meet against a rival school who had a hurdler who was the only hurdler in the conference who was as good as I was. I smoked the kid in the 110 hurdles at the beginning of the meet, but he beat me rather convincingly later on, in the 300 meter hurdles. As an athlete, my confidence was always fragile, and I was the type who could get down on myself quite easily. So, after getting my butt kicked, I didn’t return to the area in the bleachers where my teammates were sitting. Instead, I walked to the other side of the track, where no one was sitting, and sat by myself.
About ten minutes later, I saw Mr. Keeley, 65 years old, wearing a light-brown overcoat and Stetson hat on this unseasonably cool day in early May, walking slowly toward me. When he finally arrived, he sat down beside me. We sat in silence for about two or three minutes, and in that short period of time, I could feel myself calming down and moving on from my feelings of despondence and self-pity. Then Mr. Keeley spoke for the first time: “You’ll get him at the champs,” he said, referring to the conference championships that would take place a week later. Though I didn’t respond, I almost cried to know that he believed in me. My confidence was restored. What I understood was that it didn’t matter whether or not I would actually defeat my rival the following week; what mattered was that I believed that I could. Before Mr. Keeley had sat down, I didn’t believe. Mr. Keeley, my coach, was also my best friend. That old white man formed a bond with me, a young black teenager, that fueled me with strength, courage, and confidence, and that still does so to this day, in all of my endeavors.
In writing about Mr. McCarry, I again focused on a specific incident. This one occurred in the summer between my sophomore and junior years, at the end of a summer league game. Mr. McCarry didn’t coach the summer league team, but he watched the whole game, and spoke to the team after the game, which we had lost by a close margin. I had played pretty well. I scored about ten points and played tough defense and felt like I had done all I could to help us win. So even though I felt disappointed that we had lost, I felt good about my own performance.
In his post-game chat, Mr. McCarry was speaking to us for a minute or so, seemingly fighting to hold back anger, as he pursed his lips and enunciated his words very slowly before he said, “Steve McGill, you cost us the f*ckin game.” I don’t remember anything he said after that. I stood there and heard his voice droning on as I plotted my escape from this team, from the sound of basketballs pounding on asphalt and hardwood floors, from always feeling like I never played well enough to satisfy the people who distributed playing time. When I plopped into the backseat of my parents’ station wagon, I was dropping so many F bombs that my mom turned the car around so she could talk to Mr. McCarry herself. “I don’t have to put up with this f*ckin shit,” I said, slamming my fist into the seat, “I can just run track.”
Ultimately, a few months later, that’s what I did – I quit the basketball team right before the season started so I could run track indoors in addition to outdoors. I went on to become conference champion in the 110 meter hurdles, and then went on to run track at a DIII college, and throughout my adult career I have coached track, and have coached some of the best high school hurdlers to ever come out of the state of North Carolina. If Mr. McCarry hadn’t humiliated me in front of all my teammates, none of that would’ve ever happened.
In discussing the prompts with my Creative Writing students after the reading-aloud portion of the class had ended, I emphasized to them that it was no mere coincidence that so many of us had chosen authority figures for both prompts. Even I, at 56 years old, having experienced so much life after high school, went straight back to high school to discuss two people who shaped my athletic life.
The coach is the person through whom the athlete experiences the sport. If the athlete does not like the coach, the athlete will not like the sport. For me, it wasn’t just that I liked running track; I liked running track for Mr. Keeley. I’ve seen the same thing happen in the classroom in my career as an English teacher. So many students have said to me, “I never liked to read before, and English was my least favorite subject, but I like reading in your class.” The biology teacher at my current school is very popular, and I’ve read numerous personal essays in my Composition class about her and how she inspired a love of biology in students that they didn’t know they had.
So, as the coach, there are three things you must have the ability to do: 1) You have to have the knowledge of your sport so that you are the one in charge and you are the one who leads the way. 2) You have to have the ability to build relationships, treating your athletes as people first, as athletes second. 3) You have to be a problem solver. When an athlete plateaus and begins to lose confidence, you have to be able to come up with practical solutions that will lead to continued improvement.
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