The legitimate second-guessing of sports coaches

The Minnesota Supreme Court

Minnesota high school sports has been in the news for a couple reasons of late. The High School League says it needs more money. That's kind of a drumbeat: schools and their programs needing more money.
The other item comes to us from the Minnesota Supreme Court, a body normally not getting a lot of attention in the news. Our state's high court turned heads with a ruling making it easier for coaches to sue parents and other fans. Coaches are not "public figures," the court ruled, even though their whole purpose is to manage entertainment products - the teams - where the public streams into venues and buys tickets.
Our impulse might be to laugh about how "possessed" sports parents might be more susceptible to being sued. When one gets serious about this, flippant comments are not called for. So I had to think back over my journalistic career, to how I might have cast skepticism toward coaches. Online I needn't feel any inhibitions about this. You can know exactly where I'm coming from.
I started writing about Morris sports back in 1971. I have seen coaching regimes go through shaky times. I have seen regimes get the benefit of the doubt too much, as a result of what I'd call "good old boy power." No one is entitled to a coaching job. While that assertion seems self-evident, I have had to deal with elements of the Morris community who have been inclined to say certain people were entitled.
Was there a natural line of succession from Bob Mulder to Mark Torgerson in boys basketball? To suggest an alternative to "Torgy" - was that sacrilege? I would argue no, but a good number of heavy-hitters in the community would take umbrage with that.
I don't often repeat blog posts from the past, but the rest of my today's offering will be a re-run of a January 2018 post. The post was on my "I Love Morris" site. Here I do suggest shortcomings in our Morris school coaching. Is such an attitude taboo or risky now? I hope not. This post appearing below is about arguably the most staggering loss in the history of Tiger sports.
I covered many significant Morris sports events through the years, like Prep Bowl, but the loss of which I write here maybe ranks No. 1. For every loser there is a winner. So, Staples-Motley was to be congratulated on beating the vaunted Tigers at Concordia of Moorhead. I invite you to read. The post's headline was "The night we lost to the Brylcreem man."
  
Typing Jackson Loge's name brings back memories from when Jackson's father Kevin played. I felt Kevin's peak year was when he was a sophomore. I remember when he was a junior and the very highly-touted player with the top-ranked in state Tigers. We had taken second in state the previous season. We had a two-class system back then. Heck, I grew up when we had a one-class system. No point in being nostalgic about that, even if you liked the movie "Hoosiers." The "good old days" were not really better, Norman Rockwell notwithstanding.
Anyway, in 1995 we played Staples in a game for the ages at the Concordia Fieldhouse. The place was packed. I loved the Polish sausage at the concession stand. I still remember where that concession stand was. That 1995 game is on YouTube for you to see. I haven't watched it because I don't need to - I was there. Most likely you can see me a few feet off to the side of a corner of the court.
Looking back, I find those packed house memories of tournament games to be rather unpleasant: too much emotion. Why do we subject our kids to that kind of pressure, in an activity like basketball where there are no lifelong benefits from the activity? Why do we send these groups of kids out onto a court or playing field as if they're enemies, or to be more blunt, gladiators? In football the activity presents a real threat to the kids' health - unforgivable, IMHO.

Staples coach, player celebrate their win, 1995

We lost that 1995 game to the Cardinals of Staples. Legend has it that the Staples coach, Lynn Peterson, danced on a score table to celebrate the success. I remember him looking like he used Brylcreem in his hair.
The game's outcome was viewed as a monumental upset. I was fascinated as I watched it. Clearly Staples had a strategy to outdo the Tigers. I thought it was plain as the nose on your face. Staples went into these patterns of passing the ball around with their object clear, to set up a drive to the basket where the driving player either got a layup or other high-percentage shot, or would induce a flat-footed Morris player into committing a foul. Over and over it worked for them, wearing us down and maybe even demoralizing us.
MAHS seemed to have an uninspired, disjointed offensive approach. They passed the ball around but not with the same keen sense of mission. A player might impulsively put up a three-point try. As an alternative they'd lob the ball inside to Kevin where he didn't really seem in position to capitalize on his talents. He'd end up flat-footed himself, perhaps putting up a highly contested jumper, falling away from the basket.
I remember one-time MAHS super fan Arnie Hennen getting discouraged about the pass-inside strategy of our team. He said "(this business of) lobbing the ball inside - that doesn't seem to work." It didn't work on that fateful night at Concordia. We lost.
As that realization set in during the closing moments, I remember some of the Morris parents coming over to behind the Morris bench, to send the message "we still love you even though you sure blew this one." My thinking was that we simply should have won.

Adding discouragement to injury, the Morris community was way too accepting of the game's outcome. I produced journalism after that game that implied that based on our returning talent along with Loge's big-time credentials, we really should have won. I didn't editorialize but you might say I was selective with facts. To do otherwise, to be selective in the other direction (as an apologist) would have been dishonest, I felt. I was confronted at least once by fans. "That was a heavy article you wrote," Bernie Wente said. I reacted the way my acquaintances might expect, by immediately looking to Bernie's husband Dave for "support." I'm the type of person who is easily intimidated by women. The congenial Mr. Wente seemed to connect with me but he just sort of smiled and shrugged.
Having observed the disparity in tactics between Staples and Morris in the game, I really wondered: "Was I the only Morris person in that whole building who noticed this?" Was I in some sort of weird Twilight Zone episode where I was the only normal person in a town full of mannequin-like people with eyes glazed over?
My writing affirmed a perception of me that had been getting me dragged down quite badly. The Morris community never benefited from that perception of me. It only hindered my ability to perform journalism. My critics would say I'm incapable of performing journalism. And that was the essence of the problem. We had too much of a good old boy network running things. We had an aggressive teachers union. It appeared that new teachers/coaches would get recruited to join Faith Lutheran Church. A person's choice of church should be private.
I suspect that the Morris school of today is 100 percent more healthy in its attitude and organization. The 1980s were a real backwater and there were still vestiges of that as late as 1995.
I consider myself a journalist in the mold of Michael Wolff. We are undaunted. We don't glad-hand. No matter how much I may have suffered, I can't regret anything.
I remember when New London-Spicer was upcoming on the schedule, prompting Morris people to speculate on who would win "the next matchup" between Loge and Jamie Thompson. Interesting question, given that Loge was a Division I college recruit and Thompson would be headed to our lowly UMM. I considered the question and concluded: We should assume that our Kevin would win the next matchup. Shouldn't that be elementary? Well, it was to me.
I think Kevin regressed after his sophomore year. I felt we didn't have a system to bring out the best in him. I remember UMM coach Perry Ford saying to me: "Kevin is making a better impression with his play in the summer than in the real basketball season." Really? If true, and I'm quite certain it was, it was an indictment of the MAHS coaching staff.
I think we were totally out-coached in that game against Staples. To actually say that "on the street" would have made you rather a pariah in this community. That's ironic because so many of the defenders of the status quo, often said sports was secondary in education and we ought not get carried away with it. So why was Concordia Fieldhouse filled to the rafters? If sports needed to be kept in its place, why would my critics get so wild-eyed with their histrionics? Hey, it's "just sports," right?
Well, the head coach was (and is) a model family man and exemplary teacher, by all accounts. He's a gentleman. I wouldn't argue any of those points. I thought it was time for a change a few years ago when we lost in the first round of the post-season, at home, to the No. 8 seed when we were the No. 1 seed. Last year we trailed lowly YME at halftime in the first round of the tourney, so we flirted with defeat. But we bounced back and impressed. The coach's supporters are quick to cite that, while seeking to ignore the year we lost to the No. 8 seed, or when we did poorly in the post-season with Taylor Witt showing he could score around 50 points. With Taylor we needed double-overtime to win in the first round and then lost in the second. Did we have zero talent around him? I don't think so. Maybe it was even a handicap to have him scoring so many points in a game. That was the first year I was gone from the Morris paper.
The coach has had some incredible talent to carry him through phases in his career. We'll see what happens this year.
As I have written before, the biggest unanswered question in our community's history is how Chris Baxter would have done had he gotten a head basketball appointment immediately. Baxter was the choice of our new superintendent Dennis Rettke. At least that's what Dennis told me.
Baxter eventually got the girls job and although he started out well, he seemed to get nudged toward expedience. "Something happened," my friend Merlin Beyer told me. Beyer was normally a very mainstream person in our town's politics. But regarding the school in the late '80s, he had to take risks and speak out on some things. He was the classic community leader, sensing when something was "in the wind" that would impel him into some controversy. He did what he felt he had to. Eventually he won a write-in campaign for mayor. I had rapport with him. He informed me once that my job was in danger.
I survived for that time and went on quite a while longer, until I had completed 27 years. At the end, a friend told me I should just say "I've had enough of it." That would probably not have been true. But did I really reach the end? Look at what I'm doing now! I think Dennis would crack a grin in heaven, knowing I'm still active at the typing keyboard.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com