Tribute to Coaches: Coach Nelson (20th) and Coach Lyons (21st)

My research this semester will be on sports-specifically swimming, and even more specifically on how swimmers have become faster and faster. More on this in future posts.

This post is dedicated to all those coaches, particularly the volunteer ones but also the paid ones, who have taught and mentored and cheered and celebrated and grieved as they tried to make athletes of the kids who showed up for try-outs and practices and games.

I played a lot of sports when I was a kid. In hindsight, I probably should have spent some of my extra time on other pursuits besides athletics. But the times in which I grew up were, I think, even more confusing than they are now-at least in my town and my schools. I grew up during a time of cross-town busing and frequent school changes that benefited the school system's reputation for fairness at the same time that consistency, community, nurturing, and academic excellence were sacrificed in the cross-town shuffle.

Although youth sports do not or should not necessarily have to be a central point of a child's or youth's life, I will tell you some of my sports experiences and why they qualify me to put forth Coach Nelson and Coach Lyons as my nomination for coach of their respective centuries.

I began bowling when I joined a third-grade classmate at the alley where her father worked as a manager. There, I played in a league for at least a few years.

Since the bowling motion is similar to that of softball slo-pitch, I continued my youth sports career as a softball pitcher. Guided and encouraged by my classmate (still in my neighborhood but now in a different public school), I joined my friend as a pitcher on a kid's league softball team. She had the skills to pitch but because she was slightly disabled, she opted to play catcher. She was also my coach. Unlike adult coaches who focused on scrimmages and power hitting, she taught me the basics of hitting, throwing, catching, and pitching. Her disability made her a slow runner but I was able to run for her for all of her at-bats, until the year that the league become so organized and adult-supervised that such a concession was considered unfair.

In addition to bowling and softball, I also played basketball for a season or two, swam in summer league and AAU competition, and ran track. I also competed one year at the collegiate level and became familiar with the training regimens of world-class athletes.

I was never a great athlete, but with effort, perserverance, weight training, interval training, and more, I was a good one.

The highlight of my athletic career was when I earned a letter in high school track. Actually, the highlight was when my track coach (also the football coach) told me I had lettered. He seemed pleased and at the same time amused. As the father of a close friend of mine, he may have let his emotions show slightly more than otherwise. But what set him apart was this: he understood my motives for competing and didn't seem to think that the value of coaching me, an average athlete, was any less important than coaching my teammates, many of whom held statewide rankings. Not only did he understand my motives but he endorsed them as worthy--without compromising his desire to win.

I learned later that as the football coach, he was under significant pressure by the booster club to compromise his values-that is to play athletes who had not followed all the rules. My success, though moderate, helped reinforce the idea that dedication is worthy and that a kid can have fun and be recognized just by competing. I think it's this lesson that child advocates would like parents, coaches, and student-athletes to learn.

Fast forward 25 years, and you find me at youth basketball and baseball games. My oldest has followed in my average but dedicated footsteps. He's played basketball for five seasons, baseball for one. He attended an ACC basketball camp. He has had coaches who are positive, encouraging, kind, hopeful, and successful. But he has never had a coach who understood him and knew what to do with him until this fall.

When I spoke to Coach Lyons' wife before a game and told her what a great coach I thought he was, she immediately began apologizing. She was appropriately sensitive to his enthusiasm, which, to an uninformed observer, could be interpreted as inappropriate. I could say that he is positive, encouraging, kind, hopeful but he is below the standard of nearly all of my son's other coaches-at least on the surface. What makes him exceptional is that he understands why a kid plays-not just why kids play but why MY kid plays and why the other kids on the team play. And, he has been able to take my tentative kid, reinforce his strengths (defense), and make significant progress on his weaknesses (offense) and make him a respectable, contributing athlete.

He's a bit rougher on the kids than coaches have been in other seasons. But he's able to adjust his approach for each kid-firmly reminding and slightly chastising kids who know better when they take an impossible shot, move too fast, hog the ball, etc. Those who are not quite as developed, he's noticeably softer on.

I'm not sure that Coach Lyons thinks he is doing anything special. He really thinks, I think, that figuring out what to do with a kid, how to develop a kid based on unique strengths and tendences is what coaches do. But they don't.

So here's to a coach who can take dedication and make something of it, and win a bunch of ball games in the process.