Coaches Day

While writing my Memorial Day article about football players who have served the nation, I couldn’t help thinking about that class of people who give greatly of themselves to share this wonderful, difficult and uplifting game with the next generation of players. They are called coaches, and they can be heroes or demons, drill sergeants or best friends, but they inevitably give more than they receive by nearly any measurement. 

That started me thinking, and I can say with confidence that the people who have inspired, helped or guided me more than any other group have borne the title “coach.” As a lawyer, I may know more attorneys and judges. As a professor, I meet a great number of teachers. I am proud to be both an attorney and teacher; each is a noble calling. But for sheer inspiration, for providing life-changing direction, it has always been people who are or have been football coaches who have had the greatest impact on my life, apart from my family. I’m not sure if they deserve their own “day” -- perhaps the folks at Hallmark might want to think about a Coaches Day -- but today I’m going to use my time with you to thank the coaches who have and continue to inspire me.

My First Coach

When I was a ninth grader at Minisink Valley in Slate Hill, N.Y., a man named Bill Byrne taught me how to play the game with compassion, encouragement and values. I played with his son, Matt, and when I reconnected with Matt on Facebook a few months ago (something all of us 40-somethings are doing), I immediately asked about his dad. I had great high school coaches who inspired me and taught me. Some challenged me, some encouraged, but all did their level best to teach a game that reveals things about life even now, 20 some years after I last went out to practice.

The Help of Opponents

Two opposing coaches, Nick Ryder of Middletown, who had coached at Columbia, and Joe Viglione of Port Jervis, who sent his son, David, to play there two years earlier, helped me get a chance to play in college. It taught me that respect earned on the field is the kind that lasts and the kind that transcends the color of the jersey you may wear on any given day.

I played at Columbia for three different head coaches and three completely different staffs, so I may have had more contact with football coaches than the average player, yet even in bad times there were so many good coaches around. 

So Many Have Meant So Much

So many coaches have meant so much to me. The late John Bell persuaded me, an uncoordinated, oversized eighth grader, to give the game a chance and raised two great sons who shared the game. 

John Watkins was my science teacher and tennis coach. But he was a former standout football player who, while never actually coaching me in a football game, always coached no matter what we were doing, whether it was covalent equations or hitting crosscourt forehands.  

Dick Anderson of Penn State taught me more about line play in a week at football camp than I had learned in four previous years, and he remains my image of the consummate teacher, even today. 

Mike Simpson recruited me to play at Columbia, and he now coaches some of the best, most inspiring defenses in the nation on the FCS level at SUNY Albany. 

Gary Wroblewski left Columbia in the late ‘80s to be an assistant strength coach for his beloved Cleveland Browns and came within a fumble and a John Elway drive of a Super Bowl. Wrobo was a rallying point in tough times and someone who inspired more people than I can begin to count. 

A young coach named Joe White crossed my path just as I was finishing my playing career. I have never seen a young coach as mature as White. In 2008, he finished his 12^th season as the head coach at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., where he has produced double figures in future doctors, lawyers and teachers and shared the game with his two sons. 

A former line coach named Al Paul gave me my first job in sports when he was the Columbia athletic director.

An Inspiring Lot

There are indeed too many to mention, and I owe coaches so much. The list of coaches who have inspired me directly and indirectly is almost too long to recount. 

I am inspired by Pete Carroll at USC for how he makes every challenge a chance for his players to learn. 

I am inspired by Pat Kirwan, who used to run the Jets and hasn’t coached in some time but has never for a minute stopped coaching. 

I am inspired by the life of Bill Walsh, who transformed the sport. 

I am inspired by Bill Belichick, who keeps making old things new and doing other things never before dreamed. 

I am inspired by Allie Sherman, who stopped coaching 40 years ago this autumn and to whom the game may just now have caught up to. Allie has unselfishly shared with me the game and stories of great, heroic men who were more than giants. 

I am inspired by our own Michael Lombardi, who keeps re-imagining this game as a business, a science and above all a human endeavor. 

I am continually inspired by David Maraniss’ description of the great Vince Lombardi in his book “When Pride Still Mattered.” 

And I have a former playing client named Juwan Jackson who is a graduate assistant at Oregon, who will be a great coach some day and will inspire me for years to come.

The Best for Last

In this long and rambling monologue on coaches and coaching, I’ve saved the one coach above all others who meant the most to me. He was my high school line coach and is my lifelong friend, Tim Simmons. I have never known a teacher who gave so much of himself to me. Even in the summer in my college days, I went back to him.

The coach-player bond is made of a complex chemistry, but when it clicks, it’s a special relationship with greater trust than nearly any in the world. When I finished law school, I sent him a tribute that Sports Illustrated writer and former Northwestern player Rick Telander wrote in 1985 about his college position coach, Bob Zeman.  Telander said that after having 40 coaches across several sports and with no desire to ever be coached again, he didn’t know whether any coach could get their honest reward or what motivated them to do what they did, but he called Zeman “the best I had.”  I say that now to Tim Simmons of Minisink Valley on a day when I actually thought about buying a pair of reading glasses and realized middle age might finally be upon me, that you are the best I have known and I thank you and all the people called “Coach” for all you have given to me and so many like me.

I hope you’ll take a minute to think about your best coach and tell me who that person was or is and thank him (or her) here.

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