The Coach They Fired By Email

I did not call him. I did not call the superintendent, Dr. Albrecht, either, though I thought about it. It was after 6, I did not want to beg a man half my age for something that should never have needed begging for in the first place, and some things you do not fix with a phone call made in anger. My wife, Joanie, will tell you I have never once in 38 years of marriage won an argument I started on a phone in a parking lot.

So I did not reply to the email. I started the truck, drove the quarter mile to the field house, and let myself in with the same brass key I’ve carried on the same ring since 1992.

The field house smells the way it has always smelled, like liniment and cut grass and the particular mildew of 40-year-old shoulder pads. I stood in the trophy hallway for a minute with the lights still off, just letting my eyes get used to the dark, and then I turned them on and started pulling boxes down from the equipment room.

There is more in that hallway than wins. There is a photo of the 1998 team, the only state title Caldwell has ever won, 9 boys in that picture who are fathers of my current players now. There is a cracked leather football signed by a team that went 0 and 9 one year and never missed a single Tuesday practice anyway. I remember that team better than I remember most of the ones that won. The night of their last loss, a 40 point blowout against a school 3 times our size, every single boy on that roster showed up the next Tuesday at 6 in the morning for conditioning, no one absent, no one late, and I told them that was the proudest I had ever been of a team in my life, and I meant it then and I mean it now. There is a framed letter from a boy named Krenz who wrote me from Afghanistan to say he still ran our conditioning drills before patrol. There are 34 team photos in a row down one wall, and I know almost every face in every one of them, because feeding kids and driving kids home and keeping a few of them out of real trouble was always more of the job to me than the scoreboard was.

I was 2 boxes in, wrapping the 1998 trophy in a gym towel so the glass wouldn’t chip, when I heard the door.