The Coach They Fired By Email
Chad Pell sat in a folding chair near the front with a binder on his lap that I do not believe he opened one single time. When the board chair finally asked him directly to explain the budget rationale and the process he had followed, he said the words fresh direction one more time, and I watched that whole packed room go completely silent in a way that was somehow louder than if they had booed him.
“Did you consult the board before terminating a coaching contract mid season?” the chair asked him.
“I have discretion over coaching assignments,” Chad said.
“That wasn’t the question.”
Chad looked at the binder in his lap for a long moment. Then he leaned toward the microphone, and his voice came out smaller than it had in any email. “I did not notify the board because I knew they would say no.”
Nobody in that room moved. It was the first plain sentence the man had spoken in 14 months, and it landed like one, and the chair let it sit there before he spoke again.
The board voted 6 to 0 to reinstate my coaching contract for the remainder of the season. It voted to place a written reprimand in Chad Pell’s personnel file, and to require, going forward, that every coaching change, non-renewal or termination go to a board vote with advance public notice. Dr. Albrecht called this, dryly, “a policy clarification,” and everybody in that room understood it to mean Chad Pell would never again fire a man by email at 6:12 on a Tuesday night.
Chad stayed on as athletic director. I want to be honest about that, because I did not ask for the man’s job, and he did not walk away clean either. He stood up after the vote, in front of that packed room, and said he had handled it poorly and that he was sorry, directly to me, by name, for the first time in the entire ordeal. I believe some of it. I have coached boys long enough to know the difference between a kid who’s sorry he got caught and a kid who’s actually sorry, and Chad landed somewhere in between, which is about where most grown men land the first time a town makes them look at themselves.
I shook his hand. Not because I owed him warmth, but because I was not going to be the man who taught boys for 34 years that grace only gets handed out to people who’ve earned it easily.
Tuesday practice, one week to the day after the email, I unpacked the same 14 boxes I had packed the Tuesday before. Tyler and Odell came early and carried most of them without being asked, same as Ike had.