EDITOR’S NOTE: FOUL LANGUAGE CAN BE FOUND IN THIS ARTICLE.

By Jennifer Wilson

As Published in Esquire
May 14, 2013

I’m a feminist. I’m a careful parent. I didn’t eat soft cheese when I was pregnant, made both kids listen to classical music when they were in the womb, and they’ll be in Montessori school until eighth grade.

But the soccer coach yelling to my kid that he’s running like he’s dragging a piano behind him? I’m cool with that.

The old-school coach gets a bad rap in these soft times. Where I live, a high-school football coach is currently getting his hand slapped for forcing his team to run killers as punishment. I ran killers as punishment in high-school basketball. Sometimes unfairly (more often, totally deserved). And you know what happened? I learned that sometimes you take an unfair ass-kicking and shut up about it. Life can be tough. Like your coach.

Coaches are built to test our mettle. They demand — REALLY LOUDLY — that we do better, more, faster — for the team. I believe. My kids’ swimming coach — who may or may not be hard of hearing — yells so much that he has no voice at the end of practice. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are on the buoyancy spectrum. Coach doesn’t care if you’re sick, you’re nervous in the deep end, or if you’re four. If you don’t do what you’re told, it’s gonna be all spit flecks and waving clipboards for you.

Behold:

Old-School Coach: “Hey kid! Do you have asthma?”

Limp-Faced Kid: “No.”

OSC: “Do you smoke?”

LFK: “No, coach.”

OSC: “Are you a coal miner?”

LFK: “I’m not.”

OSC: “Then leave some oxygen for the rest of us and quit breathing so damned much! It’s slowing you down!”

I had a non-swimming mom ask me recently if this sort of thing scared me. “Aren’t you afraid that he’s making your kids feel bad? That yelling like that will cause long-term damage to their egos?”

My kids have great egos. Their dad and I tell them when they’re rocking it, and we tell them when they screw up. We hug them either way.

But when they are beyond the boundaries of our loving home, most people won’t consider them the perfect little starfish that we do. And they have to know how to deal with that. How to prove their worth. In swimming, that means they’ll do so by not sucking.

So no, I’m not scared of the old-school coach and his vigorous saliva spray of enthusiasm. But you know what I am scared of? I’m scared of kids who have the crap pampered out of them. Who think every single thing they do is precious and correct.

I’m scared that so many of them are fat, even though they’re swimming an hour every night, because their parents feed them poisonous, sugar-filled crap, to the point that preventable diabetes is an epidemic.

I’m scared of those attachment parented kids, who have never been allowed to wander away from the tender breast of their own mother for fear that — gasp! — bad things will happen to them in the world. Because yes, bad things will happen, and they are being softly robbed of that crucial thing children are born with — resiliency.

I’m scared of parents who don’t have the courage or the mercy or the basic human decency to tell their children no. Did you know that there are whole books out there about not telling your kids no? I think they call it Positive Parenting. Or maybe it’s Narcissist Training. And yes, that scares me.

I am not scared of the coach who lays it all out there, night after night, caring that my kids do their best, not just for themselves, but for the benefit of the whole team. Caring harder than a two-by-four to the face. Caring so hard that it is a real possibility that he will some day blow out that one vein in his neck.

A few weeks ago, that one kid Caden, the one who never listens? He was screwing around in his lane when everyone else was working hard at a 500.
Coach was yelling to get his attention, but you know how Caden is. So Coach, who is about 137 years old, kneels down, hooks his Velcro-shoed feet over the side of the pool, and fishes into the water to grab the kid by the shoulder. Only he’d gotten himself too far out into the water and he lost his balance, which cantilevered him underwater from the chest up. He sort of struggled there for a few seconds before the other kids realized what was happening and pulled him out.

And when he came up? He was still yelling.

When someone is bearing down on us, jamming a thick finger at our faces, it’s a make-or-break moment. Are you really trying your best? Or can you go further? Deeper into yourself, for the benefit of the people around you? Usually you can.

Ask the kids how they feel after they’ve just finished five laps around the soccer field because they weren’t paying attention when coach was showing them a play. They’ll say tired, but they’re smiling. I think what they’re feeling is something like “pardoned.”

The old-school coach also teaches old-fashioned penance. Also a good thing.
I can’t deal with yelling parents. I loathe yelling teachers. But you want your kid to learn how to physically and mentally find their limit? Find an old dude with a whistle around his neck and a stopwatch. I wouldn’t be who I am without the ones who forced me to field unwieldy short hop grounders for a half-hour after softball practice to make me less afraid of the unexpected — and of pain. (I think it was good prep for parenting, now that I think of it.)

I’ve had assholes who torture you because they’re into that sort of thing. They’re the ones who make you play through the knee injury (or, in my quarterback brother’s case, through the ruptured spleen that nearly killed him). They bench you because they don’t like you, or they make you run because they like watching lady boobs bounce. Or assholes like Mike Rice, who aren’t smart enough to teach you, so they’ll degrade you instead, fueled by unnamed furies that they desperately hope will dissipate by causing a kid harm.

I am not in favor of that kind of coach.

No, it’s the Old-School Coach I will continue to sing the praises of, because I know where his heart is. He wants you to do your best. He wants you to understand that sometimes the team is more important than you alone. He wants you to stop embarrassing yourself, for chrissakes.

I once asked my son’s soccer coach, a Ditka-looking guy in wraparounds and sleeveless t-shirts, what I could do at home to toughen him up a little.

Coach stood there, hands on his hips in that coach way, and he looked at me. Well, I think he was looking at me. There were the wraparounds.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing?” I asked again.

“If he’s got it, I’ll find it. That’s my job,” he shrugged. “Then I send him home. And you give him a hug, and tell him good job, and you love him, and he’s the greatest. That’s your job. My job; your job.”

My kid scored a goal last season. But not until Coach made all the other guys hold back in a blowout match until he did. Something just clicked after that, and he’s made a few more since then. Coach found it.

The good ones find it. They teach us to sacrifice our small selves for the greater good. That there’s glory in working so hard that it brings tears to your eyes. That sometimes, you just shut up and show you can take it, and then you hustle like hell to prove you’ve got the character to rise above that.

They find it.

I am inclined to stand back and let them.

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Jennifer Wilson is the author of Running Away to Home.