Work will continue after final bell

For the students, these are the dog days of the school year — when the countdown to summer vacation nears liftoff and the air is thick with anticipation.

But in an office behind the attendance counter, Wayne McKnight is doing double days.

The West Valley athletic coordinator is in the process of finding a new coach for the Eagles’ girls basketball program. Again.

A year ago, McKnight was in the same position. He finally announced the hiring of Paul Vorhees in July. Vorhees decided, for personal reasons, to move on, accepting the head coaching position at Kent-Meridian High.

“Having to do it at the one spot is a little strange,” McKnight said. “To do this two years in a row is kind of, wow. And then you get a couple of us doing it — Cheney is doing it, too.

“Life throws you twists sometimes.”

Earlier this spring McKnight thought he had finished his hiring for the year when the school promoted Craig Whitney to be the new head football coach.

But no.

“Off the top of my head, I haven’t,” McKnight said when asked if he had put much time into hiring a head coach. “I know that from the time we get it on board as an official resignation to the time that you get it in place to actually make an announcement, it can be a lot of double days — what I call 16-hour days.

“Last summer, the actual announcement was mid-July. It took us a month, almost two months.”

There is an assumption that an opening for a head coach, like a better mousetrap, is a cause for the world to beat a path to your front door.

Not so, McKnight said.

“You can’t just assume they’re going to show up on your doorstep and that there are a lot of people looking for jobs,” he said. “There’s a lot of good people out there, but you’ve got to look hard.”

McKnight said he hopes to begin the interview process sometime next week.

But that’s not the end of the road.

After that there are background checks and more work — all to make sure the fit is right between school and coach and between coach and school.

An award-winning series in The Seattle Times pointed out the importance of those background checks. That series found numerous cases of coaches, some in the public school system, who prey upon the young people they are assigned to coach.

“Honestly, the safety factors for that have been pretty clean and pretty ongoing for a long time,” McKnight said. “I think the antennae at all schools are up a lot higher. You don’t take anything for granted, even if you know the candidate personally. You still do very deep background checks once you get to that level.”