Coachean Life

I have to admit that I sort of rushed through that latest True Tale of Debate Adventure. I didn’t even put opening music on it; to be honest, I’d forgotten how I had done so previously. Needless to say, O’C complained about the veracity of part of it. He wrote me a note saying that he had gone to the desk clerk on that fateful night, rather than the desk clerk going to him. Curiously enough, he did not take me to task on this: “He ripped open his shirt to reveal the gold key hanging down his neck and, also, his rippling muscles and Situation-like abs.” I guess that part must have been true.

The world at large seems to be heading down to Kentucky today or tomorrow, at least according to Twitter and Facebook. The annual pilgrimage, I guess, but mostly by the same annual pilgrims. I’m certainly not the only person who has noticed this, that for all its hifalutin goals, it’s pretty much the same player schools year after year. This is not because they are deliberately exclusive, but because there aren’t that many high schools out there with the money to support a national team of any sort whatsoever. People complain all the time that sports teams get all the gravy, but how many high school football teams are in Texas this week, New York the next week, Minnesota the next week, and Chicago the week after that (more or less—maybe every two weeks)? There’s nothing wrong with this; more power to ‘em and all that. But it shouldn’t be ignored. TOC is an extremely parochial event, for all its ecumenicalism. Life tends to be like that. Life is not fair.

Of course, those same schools are, undeniably, good, mostly run by excellent, competitive coaches. That’s part of it too, don’t get me wrong. I have a feeling that if you put, say, Aaron T in a desert surrounded by literally no one under the age of twenty, in a couple of years he’d have somehow created a debate team out of the palm leaves that was qualified for TOC, NDCA, NFL and the Vatican. He’d still need a couple of bucks in his back pocket to help the cause, though. Just sayin’.

One has to wonder, what do these great coaches do that the rest of us aren’t doing? When O’C and I talked about the future of TVFT, interviews with AT and others were on our mind. If we can pick their brains a bit, maybe we can find something useful for the rest of us. Can’t hurt.