Pitchin with Pritch: Coaching success defined differently by different people

W e have gotten through the 2021 season in high school sports and are nearly through with the summer sports season.

If you take time to reflect a little on past seasons of all sports in all states, you find a lot of common things in high school athletics. 

When I started coaching in the 60s—and that is 1960s, not 1860s—I remember a couple of statements coaches made at clinics I was attending:  

 “There are two kinds of coaches—those that have gotten fired, and those that will get fired.” 

The second was, “The longer you coach at one school, the fewer friends you will have each year.”

I was just getting started in the profession and I wondered then just what kind of profession is this? 

Sometimes,  I now think those are pretty close to being valid statements. 

I think it is really much easier now to get fired from a coaching position than it was when I started. 

There has always been parent involvement and that is fine as long as the fine line in the sand isn’t crossed.

 I coached long enough that I got to see and be involved in some of the things they never told us in the coaching classes that we took. 

So every year, there are winning high school coaches that get fired or quit as a result of parental pressure, and every year many of those coaches don’t see it coming.

In today’s situation, the coach may be winning but that winning doesn’t give coaches the leverage you might think it would. 

Public and legislative policy has swung towards declaring parents as the best judges of what their children need. 

In addition, it has assisted them in exercising that judgement by providing the opportunity such as charter schools, state-funded vouchers for private-schools and the right to change schools without having to move. 

It is also true that parents are putting out more funds for their child to attend summer camps, special teams, traveling teams, etc. 

With that out-pouring of money, I think more parents want input into what coaches should do with their child. 

I am in favor of kids trying to improve their skills in-season and out-of-season. 

But in my mind, just because they do that, it does not give their parents any privilege in telling a coach how that child should be used in a program. 

Coaches have been fired with some really inventive reasons over the years, such as an Indiana coach. 

He was told that one of the reasons he was being removed was that he didn’t wear enough school apparel at games and he used degrading words when expressing things a player had done in a game.

A few years ago, I had a friend who I had coached with for a number of years stop in to visit. One of his comments about coaches being fired was this: 

“Pritch, you and I couldn’t coach anymore because we raised our voices at our players when they screwed up what we were trying to do.”

I do recall raising my voice a time or two but I told my players that I wasn’t yelling at them, but at what they were doing or not doing. 

A coach also needs to know how each of players reacts to being corrected. 

Some players I had to correct without yelling at them, because they would pout or get so worried that they would get nothing done for that practice. 

Then I had some that fully understood why we yelled at them at times.

One of the best players that I had the privilege to coach was the type that needed yelled at more than he should, but he didn’t let it bother him mentally. 

Many times he would stop in the coach’s office and say, “ Sorry coach. I will be better tomorrow,” and most of the time he was.

My Brush with Holdrege

There are a lot of factors that sometimes cause coaching changes. Any way you look at it, coaching is difficult. It takes time both on the coach’s part and the player’s part. 

Success in coaching is defined differently from school to school by the people whose job it is to evaluate the coaches. 

I remember a long time ago, I got a call from a school that I won’t mention here (it was Holdrege), and the caller was the president of the school board.

He wanted to know if I would be interested in interviewing for the head basketball coach position there. 

When I told him I would, he asked me to resign and they would call to set up the interview. 

Not being very smart, I went to Mr. Todd and told him what was happening and gave him my letter of resignation. 

Days went by and then one day I saw in the World Herald that Holdrege had hired the coach at Loup City as their next head basketball coach. 

I didn’t know what was going on so I called the superintendent at Holdrege.

To bring this ramble to a close, he basically told me that he had taught a school out in the west and my record (106-25) wasn’t all that impressive. 

He said that at Grant, all you had to do was roll out the ball and the wins came. 

I probably didn’t help things any when I told him that I guessed I could have won the 25 that we had lost but he didn’t find any humor in that either. 

Anyway, success mean different things to different people. But I would suspect that wins are what most people consider being successful.