A long time ago — a previous life, it seems — I coached youth baseball and basketball. I was never the head guy, just the assistant, and that was more than all right with me.
The head guy, you see, has to deal with parents.
Now, parents are a necessary component to youth sports — biologically speaking — and while some are great to be around, others can be a damnable nuisance.
Football coach Pete Carroll knows about such nuisances, though he’s too savvy to use that term. A Wednesday Los Angeles Times story detailed Carroll’s care and feeding of the parents of his USC Trojans. Carroll takes that as part of his job and is attentive to it.
Still, you can’t please everyone, as Carroll found out when a parent’s grousing made its way to the Internet.
“He has to do what he has to do for USC’s program,” the parent told the Times while denying he knew how the knock on Carroll got worldwide distribution. “ … But I have to do what I have to do as a father, which is looking out for my son’s interest.”
Ah, yes, must look out for Junior’s interests. We wouldn’t want the son to look after his own interests, now would we? Might help with his maturation process, and of what value would that be? Always better to have Dad step in.
Still, comparatively, Carroll has it easy. He could, for instance, be Matt Iorlano, soccer coach at the Newburgh Free Academy in Newburgh, N.Y.
Iorlano was preparing his team for a key game on a recent Friday when senior sweeper Sam Giron, one of Newburgh’s best players, delivered an ultimatum from Dad: “I have to play center midfielder or else my father doesn’t want me to play.”
Iorlano’s response? “I guess you’re not playing.”
“Coach (Paul Matthews) and I are the coaches,” Iorlano later told a reporter. “We’re going to make the decisions. I’m not going to have a parent tell me where their kid is going to play and threaten me that they aren’t going to play.”
Seems reasonable to me; it didn’t to the center midfielder-wannabe, who left his uniform on the bench and departed — along with his kid brother Jorge, also a key player for Nerburgh.
Did the decision cost Iorlano? It did not. The team clinched a division championship with a 4-2 win. Did the Girons quickly reconsider? They did not. The coach approached Sam Giron in class to talk Monday and was “blown off.”
But there is a nice ending, after all.
Later in the week, the player approached the coach and asked back on the team and said (gulp) he’ll actually play where the coach wants him to.
How the father feels I about all this, I don’t know. But it appears the coach is happy, the player and his brother are ... well, happier, anyway — and I’m ecstatic. Why?
I’m still not coaching and having to deal with the species Parentis terribilis.
Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.
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