I owe Skip so much. After three years of swim camp, going back-and-forth across the country to come back to Stanford to coach at swim camp, hoping to get that break. The last day of my third year there was the year that I wasn’t gonna come back anymore. I decided I needed to find something else. This was my last summer at camp. I had tried to get noticed the first two years and gave up on that going into this third and last year. I decided I was just going to coach my ass off rather than try to get a job. On packing day after the last camp session Skip drove over to the dorms. If you’ve ever been there, we lived in the Cowell cluster of dorms. They were tattered. They were beaten up. They were the furthest walk on campus to the pool so I’m guessing they were the least expensive for Skip and Richard to rent for us during camp. At any rate he drove up in his little red Honda prelude and stoped next to me as I’m loading up my Volkswagen Jetta to drive back to Illinois to figure out my next move. The driver window comes down slowly. Skip’s got those 1970s sunglasses on And he just says “hey what are you doing this year? I lost my grad assistant at the last minute, do you want the job? It pays zero and I mean literally nothing.” Then against my best judgment, which is what I do a lot in my sense of humor, which is very different from his; I said: “well I’m gonna have to give that some thought Skip.” He looked at me like he was about to shoot me in the face with whatever type of rifle that he used in Vietnam. I quickly said “Skip I’m kidding. This sounds like a great opportunity, but I will have to figure out how to make a living here”. Rent was not cheap in the bay area. This was probably at the beginningof the.com bubble or a lot of people were renting out bedrooms for thousands of dollars a month. Without missing a beat, Skip told me he’s got a buddy over the hill in Los Altos. “His name is Gordon Collet. Here’s his phone number. Give him a call. He needs an age group Coach. He’ll probably pay you enough to cover your rent and food”. What a day. I asked him when I needed to be back or did I need to just stay and start he said “no school starts late here and we go away and do a camp before we come back for school. Our first day here is 7 September don’t be late for practice”. So I went back to the Quad cities and let some people in on my offer to see what they thought. Another mentor of mine that I talked with who I had been coaching with side-by-side for the past few years with Moline high school and the Moline blue Marlins: Frank Boothe. Frank and I went out to country Manor to play some golf. It’s basically farmland converted into a nine hole golf course. It’s very inexpensive. You could get on it almost anytime during the day during the week. Frank and I had a great golf day. We always got a cart. We never wanted to walk the stupid course. It had lot of hills. We had one hole left and he stopped the cart, looked me in the eye and said “well have you decided? Are you leaving?” I just looked at him. I said “what about this? What if I take a leave of absence from Moline high school and the blue Marlins I go and do that year and then I can come back and use what I’ve learned with the teams here”. Frank looked me in the eye and he said “there’s no fucking way if you leave that you’re ever coming back because if you go Coach at Stanford University, you need to use that somewhere bigger than here. Do not come back.”
It turned out that my decision to “just coach my ass off whether they noticed or not”, and then just move on, ended up being the lesson learned.
I have a lot more “Skip” stories, but this one is just about gratitude and lessons learned.
What a gift to have had these people in my life. As a coach you get so so many restarts. This was an early one.
This was just the “next beginning” of many….
Every Four Years™ 