BOBBY COPELAND
Sports Editor
WAXAHACHIE – After last week’s
editorial on The Ellis County Press’
sports page, the results of a survey answered by Southwestern Assemblies of God
University baseball players offended coaches, who said they felt left out – as if
two sides of the story were not covered.
This would certainly be
a legitimate concern if the coaching staff had no other venues to voice their
opinions or their “side” and if in fact the players’ side was also covered. In
reality, the players’ opinions and views have never been covered by our local
media until now. It’s always been sugar-coated press releases by SAGU’s public
relations machine.
Your humble sports
editor is not part of this story, but my background as a former SAGU athlete
allows me to opine with confidence the views of the players and their side of
the story were never covered by any other publication, official or unofficial,
until now. The fact someone dared to cover only
the perspective of the players, which, after all, was the actual subject of my
opinion piece last week, seems to have offended some who are, frankly, perhaps
a bit too easily offended. (full disclosure: ECP news editor Joey Dauben and I both attend SAGU)
In the past,
the story has been that losing seasons were the result of what the players did
with little to no reference to what the coaches may or may not have done. As an
example, do the coaches have adequate plays in the play book? I can attest, as
a former athlete, that I saw very limited plays (two defensive formations and one
offensive formation for the football team) and from the results of this survey
it is clear the old “narrative” that all losses are almost solely the fault of
the players is as untrue today as it was a few years ago and somebody,
somewhere, somehow, has to finally present not just the school’s perspective or the coach’s “narrative,” but the
players’ perspectives and concerns.
Last week’s piece
could have have resulted in an honest self-assessment of the situation by the
school and the coaches; serious questions should have been asked. For instance:
if the teams are under-performing year after year with no coaching
changes even as the player roster changes then does it make sense to say that only or even mostly the players are to blame? As a private Christian school, should
the same measure of excellence in ministry being demanded of the coaches be
demanded of students who are training for ministry there? Are the coaches
leading the players by example, giving what is necessary for winning games?
The Bible
says we are to reprove, rebuke and exhort one another, and in the past the
players’ have been openly and publicly subjected to rebuke and reproof. Are the
coaches so thin-skinned that when they
are subjected to the same type of
reproof they cry “foul?” Who amongst the SAGU staff or in the PR department has
ever run to the rescue of the players and said, “You are being one-sided here!”
A good leader
uses the human material they have and shapes it into what is needed for success
and after a period of time (three years in some cases), we see little to no
improvement; common sense demands that we ask basic questions about the
ability, or at least the “best practices” of the leaders, rather than merely
blaming the people they lead.
In many
colleges, coaches who fail to produce winning seasons for three years are
fired. I am not calling for this, but my point was then and is now that the
players are not to blame, not for all the losses nor for most of them: when the
players change and the coaches don’t then the coaches need to ask “am I putting
my best foot forward here?”
You can take
this opinion piece as an offense or an opportunity to ask tough questions; you
can use this opportunity to grow or you can run away. You can blame the
players, or even the sports editor who carried the message of a survey indicating
numerous problems, or you can say “OK, I don’t like this, I am not happy with
this, but maybe there is some truth or wisdom here for me.”
As one friend
of mine likes to say about excuses: “Excuses are tools of incompetence that
build monuments to nothing, those who specialize in them seldom specialize in
anything else, excuses, excuses, excuses.” Now, write that 500 times!
Bobby Copeland is the sports editor at The
Ellis County Press and can be reached at bobbycopeland@sagu.edu
or at SAGUTalk.com.
