I went to a small Catholic high school in rural Vermont where it was difficult filling the football roster with enough players let alone less popular sports such as track and field. The school even had trouble finding a proper coach; so they allowed the junior varsity football coach, Coach Dick, to simultaneously coach football and track and field. Coach Dick enjoyed the simple things in life such as reliving his own high school football championship 15 years past, chewing tobacco, and punting footballs high in the air in hopes of hitting unaware players during practice. During our daily lineman drills, he would regale us with his fourth quarter heroics in the state championship where with a broken arm held together merely by tape he landed the perfect block to get his running back over the goal line.
Once he became the track and field coach however, Coach Dick spent much of his time hounding myself and the other lineman about signing up for shot put. I finally relented with the promise that I would never have to attend track and field practice and all I had to do was show up for the track and field meets. At the first meet, I still had not touched a shot put. Coach Dick ran me and another lineman through the two basic shot putter techniques a half hour before the event began!
Needless to say, we did awful. But I thought a bad score was better than forfeiting for lack of players. On the bus ride home, Coach Dick made a big production out of walking from the front of the bus to where I and the other “shot putter” sat in the back. He approached with a huge smile and a sheet of paper in his hand. The whole bus listened as he loudly read off the other teams’ shot put distances of the day. Then he read our embarrassingly lower distances. Then he looked at me and said, “Ohh, I was reading shot put distances of the girls teams! You couldn’t even throw like a girl!” Thanks, Coach Dick!
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