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Coach Turner


I never played sports growing up. Well, almost never. I did play football on the school playground and in Guy Woodward’s yard across from our church. And there was the time I was knocked out in the third grade when a baseball hit me behind my right ear because I took a shortcut in front of a pitcher. We were playing Red Rover from opposite sides of the playground while a baseball game going on in the middle. Bad choices equal bad results. After Danny Howard’s 90 mile-an-hour fastball knocked me out he grabbed me up and carried my limp body to first-aid.

I was one of those kids that realized at an early age I was not coordinated enough to play sports. The closest I ever came to playing a real sport was the year I wanted to join the high school track team. The coach had watched me run in PE and said I had potential. He said I should go out for track. So, I said, Okay. I’ll try it. I was able to practice with the team a couple of times before it became apparent my extra-curricular activities and transportation back and forth to school would not work. My mother didn’t drive, and I had no license. My father had a job working with the state lime plant in another town, so I had to drop out.

The coach wasn’t happy. He called me a quitter. A loser. Said I’d never amount to anything and he had no use for kids like me that didn’t see things through. I’ll admit that I was partly to blame. If I had been a little more mature, I would have thought things through, and known transportation would have been an issue before I joined the team. But what he said stung badly. From that day forward, I wondered if I was a loser.

But I began to notice something. There was another coach in high school that was over the girls’ basketball team that didn’t act like the track coach. That guy always had something positive to say to the kids. He walked like he had a purpose. He walked like he had authority. There was something different about him. I have no idea whether he knew me as an individual or just another kid in the system, but I felt like I knew him.

I heard stories about him picking up girls that wanted to play basketball and giving them rides to and from practices and games. I heard if anyone had a problem, they could go to him and he’d listen. I never heard a negative thing about him. Everyone said he was the real deal.

In my junior year I was tapped to be a photographer for the school paper staff. It was called The LHS Review. That became a turning point in my life. I was driving by then and able to go to most of the school activities. There were times I traveled with the teams to out of town games. My horizons broadened quite a bit after that.

While running up and down the sidelines of football games and basketball games I envied the kids that had athletic abilities. However, I was well aware that my 116-pound frame wasn’t made for doing much more than carrying a camera. I was the typical 98-pound weakling folks joked about and I realized I was lucky to be as close to the games as I was. The players in the games were not the only things I was watching. I was watching the coaches, too. Each had a different way to interact with their teams. Some yelled and screamed from the sidelines. Others would speak and use hand gestures. Some would get red faced and angry looking. Others would simply nod or shake their heads.

Out of all the coaches I observed it was the girls’ basketball coach who most impressed me. He spoke. They reacted. He gestured. They understood. He used his authority in such a way it inspired and motivated the players. I had the impression he never called any of his players losers or quitters. He was there for them.

The years passed by and I graduated from high school before I knew it. More years passed by and occasionally I would thumb through some of those old pictures in the school newspapers, and my yearbooks and I would reminisce. Whenever I came across a picture of the track coach I would remember his words to me the day I told him I had to leave the team. They hurt as much as they did all those years ago. But when I saw the basketball coach’s picture - I had nothing but admiration for him.

Remotely, with the help of social media, I kept up with him throughout the past few years. I learned I wasn’t the only student that admired him. Why should it have surprised me? Everyone loves a man among men. A champion he was. I just have one regret. I never told him how much I respected him and admired him. Most likely it would not have mattered. He probably didn’t remember the skinny kid that ran up and down his court snapping pictures of his players.

He passed away this week. Like a giant oak in the forest that falls and leaves a great void, so will his passing be. During the last few days I have watched as tributes from his former students and players were posted on social media. They confirmed what I have thought for the nearly five decades I’ve been out of school. He was a true man among men. Farewell Coach Turner. You will not be forgotten.

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Rick Algood
February 16, 2019

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