Dealing with coaches (1,367 words)

I’ll try to make this sort of brief, though I can’t imagine I can.

Anyway, whenever I speak to a class, a civic club, anything, this is the topic everybody enjoys the most. Because it’s impossible to do this job for too long without being berated by a coach. It happened to one of our sportswriters, Jeff Johncox, earlier this season for the first time. It was about time.

Basically, he’d highlighted a high school player who had failed to catch two passes, one thrown by his quarterback and one by the opposing quarterback. Both the player could have had and both he missed and it might well have impacted who won. He mentioned it the sense of maybe if this, this, this, this, this and this hadn’t happened, maybe the team he was covering that night would have would have won instead of lost. He wasn’t calling the kid out, he just mentioned it. Well, this kid’s coach didn’t like it, so he got chewed out.

Well, that didn’t exactly happen to me recently, but something did, so I’m writing this.

I have been absolutely berated twice by coaches. By Tim Skinner, who was then the girls basketball coach at Woodward High School (he later became the coach at Norman High School; he is, oddly, the only NHS girls coach not to have won a state title since Sherri Coale built the program to promenance), and Chuck Long, amazingly, after he had left OU as offensive coordinator and taken the job at San Diego State.

I think Skinner just didn’t like what I was writing and Long is kind of a long story. So I’ll tell it.

I’d written some things he didn’t like about Rhett Bomar and he wanted me to stick around after his appearance at Bob Stoops’ weekly press conference one day to talk to me alone. So I waited forever for him for about 45 minutes, after which he told me he didn’t have time, but he’d see me at practice, right? Well, I don’t go to practice very often, though he saw many many times after that moment at other Stoops’ conferences or during after-game media sessions, though he never sought me out. Then I bumped into him after he got the S.D. State job at a Crosstown Clash basketball game and he WENT OFF. I had lauded Kevin Wilson’s play-calling in my column from the Holiday Bowl and used a line that said something like those parts of the Sooner Nation who never cared for Long’s vanilla approach had to love what they were seeing in San Diego. So, he screamed at me for A WHILE. Because I’d always liked him, it bothered me. But I guess I got over it.

Then there’s the case of Kelvin Sampson, who once told me (paraphrasing),  ”Well, I don’t understand your question but what I do understand is you don’t like the way we play basketball and that comes out in your writing.” Well, who did like his style of basketball? Of course, there were other occasions where he was just flippant, petty and nonsensical in the way he’d answer your questions. Really, you just never knew what Kelvin would be like. Often it depended what you’d written last. After a couple years on the beat, you were used to it.

(For the record, I’ve never been upset with the way I’ve been treated by Bob Stoops, Sherri Coale, Jeff Capel, Patty Gasso or Sunny Golloway – though Patty once said “I remember you,” after a pointed question one day I was filling in for Johncox at a softball game; but that’s fine, made me laugh. Once, Martin Smith (track) never called me back. No big deal. Santiago Resterepo’s always been great, especially considering how little coverage volleyball gets. And Jack Spates surprised me this summer when I couldn’t get a comment, working through media relations, for a story over the summer confirming the state of the OU wrestling roster. Still, nothing personal. “No comment” can be a drag, but it’s never personal)

Well, what happened Friday at Midwest City is nothing by comparison to Long, and really to Skinner and Sampson, too. And still, well, what’s a blog for anyway if not stuff like this? No doubt, this is part of “The Life of a Sports Editor.”

Last Friday I was in Midwest City covering Norman High-MWC football, and the one thing I really wanted to know after the game was the status of sophomore running back Donovan Roberts, who left in the first half and did not return. Because Roberts is a home run threat at tailback and his availability for the coming game with Lawton Ike, I thought, was even more important than the fact NHS lost 63-7.

Well, Roberts said he had a hip pointer and was held out as a precaution. Like it was no big deal. So I took that to head coach Greg Nation, who said “He won’t be playing next week. It’s a possible hairline fracture.” Well, now what? Nation’s answer was confusing. It was a POSSIBLE hairline fracture, but he’s absolutely NOT PLAYING? So I went to an assistant coach, Sonny Feexico, told him what I’d heard. He sort of shrugged. Hey, nothing wrong with that. In a way, that’s an answer.

But now I was concerned that somehow Nation was talking about somebody other than Roberts. NHS is dealing with a bunch of injuries, so who knows. Maybe there was a misunderstanding. So I went back to Nation. And when I asked him a second time, he said this: “I don’t know, that’s what the doctors told me. He might have a torn ACL for all I know.”

He’d lost 63-7, he might have thought he was answering the same question a second time. I get that his patience was short. On the other hand, he had to know he was on the record, his lack of patience was itself a telling part of the story of the game and NHS’ injury problems. Then Nation said this to me, without my having asked him a question: “Boy, when you asked me about Greg Offenburger, that really threw me. I can’t believe you asked me about Greg Offenburger.” Or something very close to that.

About 5 minutes earlier, after he’d told me about all their injury problems, he ticked off some of the names of the fallen. When I heard Offenburger’s name, I asked what position he played. So that’s what that was about. I didn’t know what position Offenburger played. I knew he was one of the Tigers’ best defenders, and if I’d given it 10 seconds of thought, I also knew he was either a defensive end or a linebacker. But I asked the question so I’d know for sure, to write an accurate story. Whatever, Nation was aghast that I didn’t know, like I’m supposed to have his two-deep on insta-recall.

Well, when he said to me “Boy, when you asked me about Greg Offenburger, that really threw me. I can’t believe you asked me about Greg Offenburger,” it made me mad. I could not believe he was taking offense to something like that. The week before and the week before that I’d written about his team in glowing terms after victories over Putnam City and Westmoore. And even in the story I eventually wrote about the MWC game, I wasn’t that hard on the Tigers. Pretty much, I stuck with the injury angle. I could have been, but I wasn’t, because I didn’t think that was the crux of the story. Perhaps if I’d been covering Norman North, I wouldn’t have been so charitable. Hard to know. However, I did run Nation’s entire quote:  ”I don’t know, that’s what the doctors told me. He might have a torn ACL for all I know.”

I have since heard he didn’t like that. And I have since wondered if he doesn’t say what he said about Offenburger, do I save him from himself a little, and cut the quote off at “that’s what the doctors told me.”

I don’t know. It was a great quote.

So I used it.

It’s what I do.

(so much for writing short: 1367 words; longest blog ever)