Coles On Empty, And This Could Be It At Gar-Pal

The longest 2 seconds of the tournament left Tim Coles looking better than he felt. Coaches who are good enough to be working in March usually put their best face on and their feelings on hold.

After three and a half weeks of walking around with what he half-fears to be pneumonia, Coles wonders why?

So he’s honest. He feels lousy.

Still, he has the Garfield-Palouse Vikings in the trophy round of the State B tournament today for the eighth time in 10 years. Their game for fifth and eighth at 1 o’clock seems almost routine, but it could be something special. It might be Coles’ last on the bench with the Garfield-Palouse Vikings.

The feeling just isn’t right.

“I need an attitude change,” Coles said. “I work so hard to get the kids to the state tournament that I start thinking I’m winning games instead of them. The kids are doing it, not me.”

At 41 he finds that the older he gets the faster he has to go to stay ahead. Winners only seem to float along on their own momentum. Reloading is hard work.

“The kids work so hard - I want it for them so bad - that it’s hard to relax,” the coach said. “At the end of the season I’m more intense and I’m feeling it. I think it’s aging me prematurely.”

As they’ve done so often under Coles, the Vikings on Friday seemed to will themselves past a resilient Mabton team.

In the final seconds of a survivor’s game at the Coliseum, in the rush for the last rebound, in the haste to stay one more day, Gar-Pal’s Rob Tiegs was fouled.

With 2 seconds left Tiegs, took the game to the line and missed the first of two shots.

Time out.

Coles talked of how to handle the final 2 seconds after Tiegs made the shot, not if he’d make it.

Tiegs buried the second throw.

Down one, Mabton went long with the pass, shoveled off a second pass that led to a wide-open look at the basket, and a shot of quick desperation.

All in 2 seconds.

When the shot dropped away, Mabton players sagged in disbelieving agony.

For Gar-Pal, it was another thrill in Spokane.

For Tim Coles, another long day at the office.

It’s come to this.

“I’ve told them one of three things is going to happen in the next month or two,” the coach said in a drafty Coliseum hallway.

He might stay at Gar-Pal and continue to coach. He might hang onto the teaching job and hang it up as a coach.

“Or I could go somewhere else,” he said.

So it’s “conceivable that this will be my last game,” Coles added. “I’ll give myself some time to evaluate where I’m at and what I’m doing.

“Right now I’m tired.”

That’s no reflection on the team, he stressed.

“The kids are super. At the end of the season, I put pressure on myself. I shouldn’t be doing it, but for for some reason I do. I’m killing myself.”

Perhaps anxious not to take himself too seriously Coles cracked, “Maybe Fish (assistant coach Doug Fisher) needs to hit me in the mouth to loosen me up.”

The Gar-Pal coach, who won it all here in 1990, has done some preliminary evaluating.

“I love teaching,” he said. “That’s the job I do best. I coach O.K. but I think I teach very well. I think we put out a quality product.”

Such pride of workmanship would make it hard to leave but Coles has looked.

“I looked last year a little bit to see if there was something that I’d be interested in.”

There was nothing.

“I wouldn’t fit at a school with drug or crime problems,” he said. “I’d be too difficult to work with. I just wouldn’t put up with it.”

He will put up with the demands of winning and the pressures of where he is.

But as he goes back to work today there’s a question - like a sore throat - that won’t go away.

How much longer?