The Coach They Fired By Email
The stands at Caldwell field hold about 1,200 people on a good night, in a town of 1,900. That Friday they were full by 6:30, a full hour before kickoff, and there were still cars parking along the gravel shoulder of the county road a quarter mile out. I counted 9 former players in the front row alone wearing jerseys from their own years, dug out of closets and attics, some of them 2 sizes too small across the chest now. Ike was there in his old number 23, standing next to a man I hadn’t seen in 20 years, a boy named Early Fenstad who played guard for me in the early 2000s and now farms outside of town.
When the team came out of the tunnel, every single player had my old number, 14, written on a strip of white tape across the back of his helmet, including boys who had never once spoken to me outside of a hallway. Reller, the interim coordinator, stood on the sideline with a clipboard he never once opened. He told Tyler afterward, and Tyler told me, that he had never in his life felt so unnecessary in a job he was being paid to do.
When the anthem ended, I stood in the stands with my hands in my jacket pockets and looked at the spot on the sideline where I usually stand, empty that night, and I will tell you plainly that I cried, in a way I have not cried since my own father’s funeral. I did not try very hard to stop it, and no one around me acted like they had seen anything worth mentioning.
Caldwell won that game 21 to 14. I am told it was not a particularly well coached game, that Reller called a screen pass into a blitz on 3rd and long and nearly cost them the lead, and that Tyler simply checked out of it at the line of scrimmage on his own, the way I had taught him to 2 seasons back. I am told nobody in that stadium cared one bit about the final score, and I was one of them. Joanie, who sat beside me the whole game with her hand on my knee, said afterward it was the only football game she had ever watched where she could not have told you a single play, because she had spent all 4 quarters watching me instead of the field.
Monday night, the school board met in its regular room, the one that holds 40 chairs, and by seven o’clock people were standing along the walls and out into the hallway, close to 150 of them by my count. I have been to a hundred school board meetings in my life, usually to ask for a new blocking sled or to explain a budget line, and I have never once seen anyone stand in that hallway to listen through a propped door. A handful of my players came in their letter jackets and stood against the back wall with their arms folded, trying to look older than they were. Tyler was one of them. Odell Sattler was another, with his mother beside him.