The Coach Who Benched My Son
Bo earned that spot. I need to be plain about that, because Coach Rusk spent a lot of energy later trying to make people believe it was a coach’s judgment call between two close players, and it was not. It was not close. Bo went to every summer workout, the six a.m. ones in July when the field was still wet and the older boys skipped and Coach Rusk pretended not to notice who was there and who was not. Bo was there. He put on twelve pounds of muscle hauling hay for our neighbor and doing stadium stairs after his shift at the grocery. By the time two-a-days started in August, he was the best back on that roster and everyone in the field house knew it, including Coach Rusk, who told me himself at the parent meeting that Bo had “a chance to be special this year.”
He said that in August. He benched him in October.
What changed between August and October was Lyle Trask.
If you have lived in a small town you know the Lyle Trask in yours. Ours owns the Ford dealership out on the bypass, the one with the giant inflatable gorilla every Labor Day, and he owns Trask Construction, which poured half the driveways in this county including mine. He is loud in the way that men who are used to being agreed with are loud. He sits on everything. School board meetings, the chamber of commerce, the hospital foundation. And two years ago he took over as president of the Raider Booster Club, and once he did that, the boosters stopped being a group of parents selling fifty-fifty tickets and started being Lyle Trask’s checkbook with a logo on it.
His son is Colton. A senior. I want to be fair to Colton, because Colton did not do the thing that was done. Colton is a decent-sized kid, works hard enough, and on another team in another year he would have been a fine second-string back and a good special teams player and nobody would have thought a thing about it. But Colton was not better than my son, and Colton knew it, and I honestly believe that is part of what made the whole thing rot the way it did. There is nothing worse for a seventeen-year-old than to be handed something in front of everyone that everyone can see he did not earn.
Here is the part that took me weeks to piece together, and I only got the whole shape of it because a fourteen-year-old boy was braver than every grown man in that field house.
Colton wanted to play college ball. Lyle wanted it more. And the thing about college recruiting at a school our size, out here where no scout is ever just driving by, is that it lives and dies on film. A running back who does not carry the ball does not have carries on his highlight reel, and a back with no highlight reel does not get looked at. Colton was a senior. He was out of time. He needed carries, real ones, in real games, starting carries against the good defenses, and there was exactly one thing standing between him and those carries, and it was my son.
That fall, Lyle Trask paid for the new stadium lights.