The Coach They Fired By Email

I asked him what Friday had to do with anything, since I would not be on the sideline. He just said, “You let us worry about Friday,” and helped me carry the last 2 boxes to the truck, and then he left, and I drove home to Joanie, who was waiting up with the porch light on the way she has every single Tuesday since 1992, and she did not say I told you so about Chad Pell, because she had never once said she told me so about anything in our whole marriage, and she just put her hand flat on my chest and said, “You did it right. You always do it right.”

Wednesday morning, before first period, I did something I had told myself in the truck I would not do. I called Dr. Albrecht’s office from the phone in the teachers’ workroom and got his voicemail. I stood there a second with the receiver in my hand, thinking about hanging up, and I did not, because the one thing worse than begging is doing nothing and calling it dignity. I did not ask for my job back. I did not ask him to rule on Chad. I said one line after the tone, in the voice I use on a sideline, “Dr. Albrecht, this is Vern Datz, put item 7 on Monday’s agenda,” and I hung up. He called back that afternoon to say it was done. Nobody had been in my corner yet when I made that call. I wanted it on the record that I had taken the first step myself.

Wednesday was strange in the way a house is strange after somebody dies in it, everybody moving a little too carefully, talking a little too quiet. I went in to teach my earth science classes same as always, and I heard from 3 different students before first period that Chad had called a team meeting for that afternoon.

I was not there for it, obviously, but Tyler told me about it that night on my front porch, where he had ridden his bike 2 miles to sit on my steps uninvited, which I did not mind one bit.

Chad told the team, Tyler said, that the program was moving in a fresh direction, that an interim coordinator would run practice for the rest of the week, that this was about alignment and sustainability and not about any one person. He used the word opportunity 4 times. He did not use my name once.

“Somebody asked him why he didn’t talk to you first,” Tyler said. “He said personnel matters are confidential.”

“They are, mostly.”

“He said it like it was a rule he was hiding behind,” Tyler said, “not like it was true.”

I did not comment on that, because a 17 year old boy does not need his old coach teaching him to despise a grown man, even one who deserves a little despising. I asked him how practice went instead, and Tyler said it went the way practice goes when 34 boys are all thinking about something other than practice, which is to say it did not go well, and that the interim coordinator, a young man named Reller who Chad had brought in from his old district, kept calling the fullback dive a halfback dive, and nobody had the heart to correct him twice.