Want to know who the next University of Washington football coach will be?
Can’t give you a name, but I can give you a profile.
He’ll be in his early- to mid-40s.
He’ll be a family man with two or three kids.
He’ll look good on the sidelines. That is, he’ll appear athletic, as if he could go out and play wide receiver right now.
He’ll have some personality, maybe a little pizzazz, and be able to drop a good line occasionally to keep the media appeased.
He’ll have 20-some years of coaching experience, most of it as an assistant at the NCAA Division I level.
In the past five years, he’ll have secured his first head-coaching job and had a good deal of success, perhaps rebuilding a program.
He’ll be considered either an offensive genius or a defensive wizard.
On the day he’s hired, some of his former athletes will provide personal testimonies about what a super guy, great coach and wonderful communicator he is.
He’ll be hailed as a tough but fair disciplinarian, a coach whose door is always open.
All he’ll ask of his players, he’ll say at his first press conference, is that they practice hard, play hard, be on time.
Oh yes, and that they go to class. Above all, he’ll insist that his players get a good education and leave the university with a degree.
There’ll be first impressions formed, most of them favorable. Looks good. Sounds good.
Then they’ll douse the TV lights and we’ll begin to know who he really is.
In almost 40 years of sportswriting, I’ve known some fine people who were coaches. And I’ve known some scalawags.
I knew a high school football coach who was a bigot, who would talk up his black stars to the press and then denigrate them in private. I knew a white basketball coach who had his black players babysit his kids. I knew another white coach who invited his black players to stay in his home when they were having trouble in their own homes. I’ve known high school coaches who did so much more to influence their players’ lives off the field than on the field.
I’ve known coaches who were tough and gruff but underneath it all soft as kittens.
I’ve gotten to know high school coaches better than college coaches because you can actually walk into a high school coach’s office, sit down and have a conversation with him.
High school coaches aren’t nearly as paranoid as college coaches, probably because they don’t deal with the media as much as college coaches and therefore haven’t been burned as often.
My favorite coach of all time was Marv Harshman, the former men’s basketball coach at Washington State and the UW. Harshman was knowledgeable, he was witty, he had a mastery of the language, he was a wonderful story teller, and he was a tremendous coach. He got more out of his players than any coach I’ve ever known, in any sport. He could have walked onto any playground in America, picked five kids and won with them. He was that good.
His Monday morning press conferences were usually small gatherings, depending on how the Huskies were faring, maybe a half-dozen print reporters and very seldom any TV crews. Harsh would come in, get himself a donut and a cup of coffee, and sit there and educate and entertain us for an hour. I learned more basketball from that guy than any coach I’ve ever dealt with.
Husky football coach Don James was always all business during his weekly press conferences. He’d come in with a large yellow notepad with all the points written down that he wanted to discuss. He was as prepared for the media as he was for the games.
I always felt that both Harshman and James were pretty genuine people, that what you saw was what you got. They didn’t try to charm you, they didn’t try to dazzle you. I always appreciated that they returned my phone calls, too. If you got James as he was about to sit down and have dinner, he’d say he’d call you back in 14 minutes. Exactly 14 minutes later, the phone would ring and he’d be on the other end.
That really happened. Happened once after he retired. The guy was as disciplined then as he was when he was coaching.
I appreciated both coaches’ no BS approach. I assume they were pretty much the same way with their players. Something that players appreciate.
I always felt that both coaches were colorblind, that the only thing they cared about was whether a kid could play, and was willing to give good effort and learn.
Looking back, you realize just how good both men were at their profession, how lucky the UW was to have them.
Harshman wasn’t any spring chicken when he took the Husky job. James certainly wasn’t any flash-and-dash kind of guy like Rick Neuheisel was.
Makes you wonder if either one would be hired by the UW today.
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