The Coach They Fired By Email

The email landed on my phone at 6:12 on a Tuesday night, 3 games into my 34th season, while I was sitting in my truck in the parking lot behind the field house with a cold cup of coffee between my knees.

Subject line: Coaching Assignment Update.

I almost didn’t open it. I figured it was Chad Pell sending out another one of his reminders about concession stand inventory or parking passes for the booster club. Chad had been our athletic director for 14 months. He came to Caldwell, Nebraska from a district twice our size, and he talked like a man reading off a laminated card. Fresh direction. Program growth. Alignment with district priorities. I had learned to let those words go past me the way you let a fly buzz past your ear.

This one I opened because it had my name in the subject preview. Vern, effective immediately.

It was 4 sentences long. It thanked me for my years of service. It cited a fresh direction for the program and a budget realignment that would save the district about $9,200 a year in coaching stipends by combining my position with a lower-cost coordinator role. It said my coaching duties were terminated effective immediately, and that I should coordinate with the office regarding my personal belongings in the field house. It did not say thank you by name. It did not have a phone number under his name. It was the kind of email you could have sent to anybody.

I had coached football at Caldwell High School for 34 years. I had also taught earth science and run the weight room for all of those years, so my teaching job, thank God, was not touched. I started coaching in 1992, a 28 year old assistant with a mustache I am still embarrassed by in photographs, and I took over the program outright in 1996. In 34 years I had buried 2 players, watched 11 of my former boys become fathers of boys I later coached too, and driven, by Joanie’s rough count one Christmas when she was bored enough to add it up on a legal pad, somewhere north of 400 individual rides home in a truck that had gone through 3 engines in that time. A head coaching position in this state runs on what they call a supplemental contract, separate from your teaching contract, and the athletic director oversees it, with the school board expected to ratify any changes at its next meeting. I knew that because I had read the handbook every August for 34 years, the way some men read the paper. I knew Chad had the authority to recommend a change. I did not think he had the authority to end a man’s program by himself, mid season, over a text-length email, with no board action and no conversation. But I was 61 years old and I was sitting in a dark parking lot finding out I no longer had a job I had done since George Bush was president, and I was not in a mood to go look up statutes.