Why high school coaches are quitting

By Ron Kantowski

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 | 2 a.m.

When I was in high school, most of my coaches looked like Coach Buzzcut from Beavis and Butt-head. They were Marine drill sergeants in short pants and sweat socks. They yelled a lot and made us run. Sometimes, they let us get a drink of water. But only sometimes.

You never complained about being thirsty to your parents, because if you did, your old man would yell even louder than Coach Buzzcut. Then he would put his foot up your rear end. This could be painful, because most of our dads worked at the mill and wore those Red Wing boots with the steel reinforced toe.

Coaches and parents don’t yell at their players and kids like they used to. That’s probably a good thing, because if they did, kids might not survive the Great Santini.

But at least coaches and parents were mostly on the same page then, which might be the reason Coach Buzzcut and his many disciples were allowed to blow their whistles and tell kids to “get on the line” for as long as they pleased.

Then Bob Dylan said the times were a changin’. The T-formation died and the star quarterback and head cheerleader got busted for smoking pot. It all became so confusing.

Coach Buzzcut couldn’t deal with it, so he became a full-time health teacher, and he was replaced by some guy with long sideburns who ran the Wishbone. The long sideburns are gone (except on MTV) and so is the Wishbone, but kids still like to get high now and then. Only now they test for that.

If you are a coach, that means your starting quarterback may have to sit out Friday night. And then his parents are going to be upset with you and the principal is going to be upset with you and the backup quarterback’s parents are going to be upset with you because even though their kid is 5-foot-6 and can’t throw a football through a tire of one of those giant trucks that are used to mine copper, they believe if you had only given him more reps in practice then those behemoths from Disco Tech wouldn’t have crushed him like a pack of Camels.

And then you are going to become a full-time health teacher or move on to coach in the next town, where new schools are cropping up like dandelions in spring and they haven’t yet started testing kids for pot and Red Bull and whatever other banned substance that makes them want to skip history class and not apply themselves.

Throw in inadequate funding of high school sports, increasing off-field demands and time commitments, the negative effect of club coaches, unappreciative kids, unqualified assistants and the pressure to get kids a college scholarship, and it’s a wonder why anybody wants to be a high school coach.

Oh yeah, I almost forget about the low pay. The only guy making any real money coaching high school sports is Kyle Chandler, the coach of the Dillon High Panthers. That’s because Dillon High is in Texas, where they think high school football is pretty important, and because Kyle Chandler is an actor who portrays Coach Eric Taylor on the “Friday Night Lights” TV series.

But if somebody held a gun to my head — which is like a 40 percent chance if you happen to live in Texas — and told me I had to be a high school coach, I’d coach girls.

First off, Don Haskins started out as a girls basketball coach and a couple of years ago they made a movie about him. So although unlikely, it is possible for a high school girls coach to become famous, but only if you don’t have a prejudiced bone in your body.

It seems to me that girls are just easier to coach than boys. Maybe not at UNLV, but at least in high school.

In high school, girls listen to their coaches. They run the plays. They pick and roll, because not many girls can dunk and most don’t watch ESPN’s “SportsCenter.”

Plus, girls can make their free throws, if you show them how.

According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, there are roughly 750,000 high school coaches and an estimated 20 percent of them change jobs every year. That’s 150,000 coaches. Or 300,000 sweat socks. Or 140,000 potential full-time health teachers, because I can almost guarantee that if a football coach’s only option is to teach health, at least 10,000 will retire from the school district to sell cars for their father-in-law.

One high school association that was part of a Michigan State University study said one of its hall of fame criteria is that coaches spend a minimum of 15 years on the job.

It gets few applicants anymore.

Coach Buzzcut has left the building, and they can’t find anybody to take his place.