Blog #21: Only 1055 to go: Driving the bus

#21: Driving the Bus

     I have often told new teachers, "The teacher who can teach and drive the school bus is more valuable than the one who can only teach".   It’s harder to replace the person who has more than one skill.  Years ago, the running gag among the staff regarding one of the members of the maintenance crew was that he'd never be fired because he was the only one who knew how to work the furnace.
     That brings me to my real point.  I've never considered myself a cornerstone; I'm more like mortar that “fills in” the gaps where needed.  I believe that I used this same metaphor, when I wrote about Ray Kizelevicus.
     During a short hiatus from coaching in the late '70's, on two different occasions, I was asked to coach a team that was coachless.  Both times, I teamed up with another teacher to fill the gap.  The first time, the 1976 sophomore baseball season was in danger of being cancelled because there was no coach.  Fr. Stan Wisniewski and I had agreed, independent of one another, to coach if there was another adult to help.  I had coached the sophomores from 1963 until 1969 and, while Father wasn't much of an athlete, he loved baseball, and he was more than happy to do the clerical work while I hit fungoes and pitched batting practice.
     We were the quintessential “odd couple“. A 5’6” heavyset priest, and a slender (just kidding) math teacher...but he and I had been friends from the early '60's.  I had always respected him for his intelligence and spirit; he had always enjoyed listening to me speak because he found it a challenge, when I started a sentence, to try to guess where I was going with it.  Really we just liked each other and we had a similar sense of humor.  Father passed away several years ago, and he is one of the many former colleagues that have gone to their final reward that I miss these days.
     The second time that I was pressed into service as a coach was in 1979.  The tennis team was without a coach, and John Chandler and I were asked to fill in.  That was a little more daunting; neither John nor I had any background in tennis.  Our philosophy was pretty simple:  make sure the players had a place to practice and were able to get there, make sure that we had the equipment we needed, and make sure we got the players to the matches.
     Astonishingly, Ignatius won the Catholic League Championship, and we had a doubles team that ended up 6th in the state.  Heaven only knows how far they would have gone if they had coaches who knew which end of the racket to hold.  Truth be told, John and I were blessed with some outstanding players.  The first and second singles players were Russ Elderkin and Santiago Alva respectively, both high ranking players, and the rest of the lineup was talented beyond anything that we had a right to expect.
>An interesting sidelight, from our point of view, was that John and I were summarily released as tennis coaches at the end of the season, but it was legitimate.  Rich Kehoe, who relocated from Loyola Academy to SICP, took over the tennis program and he was a bona fide tennis coach.