Redondo Union High School varsity basketball coach Tom Maier has been summarily, though hardly justifiably, dismissed. This in the wake of another dismissal three months ago, in which the varsity football coach resigned after a winning sixteen years.
"I didn't nurture the kids enough, and we were too negative," Maier commented, when explaining the rationale for removing him as varsity coach.
One parent, part of what the Daily Breeze called a "posse" of parents who criticized Maier at length, had reportedly described the former coach as a "bully." "There was no love, no nurturing," one parent pointed out. "He never sat down with him and treated it as a learning experience. He never put his arm around the kid and showed him what he needed to do. My son came home crying after basketball."
Tom Maier was hired to be a basketball coach, not a babysitter. He took on the assignment, following a reputable success in other schools, to train boys into men, not soften children into a prolonged immaturity. Athletic discipline is not just about winning games, but about winning identity and status to face a world that can do anything to diminish an individual. Athletics is not just about promoting the pride of the parents, but the reputation of the school that the team represents and the worth of the individual players, who sometimes have to learn that they are not the center of attention just because their parents tell them so.
Judging from the repetitive email explaining Coach Maier's removal, which proffered the same language following the resignation of the varsity football coach, Redondo Union's first-year administrator appears to have given in to parental pressures instead of making politically unpopular but scholastically principled decisions.
Tom Maier did his work well. He is right on "old school", and we need more of that in our schools today. I am tired of timid admininstrators, jittered over the drama that irate parents bring to the school grounds, who cave in at the first provocation of a spoiled parent. If parents are so fed up with the coaching, teaching, training, and maintaining that goes in our schools, then they should start their own school with their own money or home-school their kids on their own time. They have no business harassing teachers, frustrating coaches, and promoting a terrible example of entitlement run amok to their children.
The political infighting which is consuming our schools is hurting our youth and demoralizing our teachers. I am deeply saddened to read that Coach Maier has lost his "passion" for the job. He should not. Sometimes, a good man just has to shake the dust from his shoes. I know and believe that he will move on from this unjustified termination.
Teachers have a right to teach. Students have a right to learn. And of course, coaches also have the right to coach. No one, not even the parent, has a right or reason to interfere with this august process.
If memory serves, because I was a male student at Redondo, then he had no love for me when someone turned the bathroom lights off on me. As a result, he didn't give a fart about it, and called me a baby because of it.
ReplyDeleteIf Mr. Duncan Avery, my 9th grade PE teacher after I transferred from ROTC, was kind enough, and didn't call me a baby, then he'd let me use the faculty bathroom to avoid any more incidents like this.
um, huh?
ReplyDelete