Christilaw: Coaches’ influence felt far beyond the field

Coaches have always been some of my favorite people.

I’m not talking about professional coaches. I’ve known a few of them, but not enough to make a wholesale evaluation about them.

No, I’m talking about the men and women who dedicate themselves to coaching high school kids in a myriad of sports. They all have my respect, and some, my profound admiration.

Coaches have an opportunity to influence young lives. It’s a chance to teach and reinforce the importance of fundamental skills coupled with hard work as a building block for success. It’s an opportunity to instill a sense of teamwork and cooperation.

The really good ones infuse a sense of excitement and fun into whatever game they coach. Their players learn the game and in the process learn to be better human beings.

Former Mariner (Everett) High School football coach Frank Goddard has long been the standard against whom I measure coaches. His teams LOVED to play the game and they LOVED Goddard. He made the game fun, he made it exciting, and he made every single person involved with his program, from the University of Washington-bound quarterback to the deputy assistant ball boy, feel vitally important.

I watched how his love of the game and his love for his players buoyed Goddard in a long battle with cancer. It was the only opponent he couldn’t find a way to beat, and it was just weeks after the end of the 1991 season that he passed away.

I see a lot of Frank Goddard in the way Jim Wood has the respect of his Freeman football players.

One of the early influences on my life was the late Al Snyder, the former head boys basketball coach at West Valley and Lewis and Clark.

I never played for him and I knew him as a physical education teacher. But he and Jack Spring, Rich Shulkin, Rick Clark and Miles Phipps, all WV coaches while I was a student there, got me hooked on sports stories. Snyder had been an assistant coach to WV legend Jud Heathcote, who went on to win a national championship at Michigan State with a guy no one ever heard of named Magic Johnson, and he had a wealth of stories to tell. Spring had a long career in professional baseball and told detailed stories about Ted Williams and Satchel Paige and Harmon Killebrew. Phipps was a master punster and Clark was an enthusiastic, vertically challenged tennis coach who always wore a green warmup suit at a school dedicated to orange and black – which earned him the nickname “the jolly green midget.”

I admit it, I gave him that nickname. And it always made him laugh.

To me, all of these men had the same first name. Coach.

When I was writing for a Western Washington newspaper, I ran into Snyder at a mall food court. He had retired from teaching and had a company that resurfaced tennis courts and he was in the area with some time to kill. We had lunch together, and he got a kick out of the fact that I kept calling him “coach.”

“You can call me Al,” he grinned. “You aren’t a student anymore.”

“No, I can’t,” I said. “It’s a respect thing.”

All these years later, after decades covering his teams and his exploits, I can count on the fingers of one hand when I’ve even called Jim McLachlan, the unofficial mayor of Otis Orchards, by his nickname: “Otis.” I have never called him by his first name; I’ve always called him Coach.

Longtime Central Valley gymnastics coach Kim Brunelle is an exception, since we were students together. The difference is that she was Kim before she was a coach. But still, when she’s at a competition, she’s Coach.

When you sit in the stands at enough games, you hear the way parents sometimes talk about the men and women who coach their kids. Too frequently they question, not just WHO’s playing (a problem universally solved by playing that parent’s son or daughter), but HOW they’re playing. Watch enough ESPN and everyone begins to think they know how to coach the Xs and Os.

A growing number of coaches have left the profession because they no longer wished to deal with the sometimes ugly influence of parents.

That’s the dark underside of prep sports.

Look, I’ve been puzzled by decisions some coaches have made. Trust me, they aren’t always brilliant and they occasionally make bad choices. They’re the first to admit that.

Coaches don’t take the job for the stipend. Many of them put that extra pay back into their own programs. They take the job because they know they can make a difference. A difference in the lives of the kids who play for them and a difference in the lives of the people who need something in their lives to root for and have respect for.

It’s an honorable profession deserving of our thanks and our respect.