This is a sad and instructive story about a colleague who at his peak was perhaps the best teacher I have ever known. It is about the danger we face when we don’t take risks. I will assign my colleague the ficticious  intitials: C.F. to protect his identity. I still revere him for how much I learned from him as one of his coaching assistants.

By gesture and statement, C.F.  made it clear to every player on his football team that he thought the world of him, and he never raised his voice except in praise. The players responded by challenging themselves to prove to themselves and him that he was right in his good opinion of them. I have never known athletes at any level to derive as much joy and satisfaction from a sport as C.F’s players did.

A brilliant aspect of  his teaching was that, unlike many coaches who design their schemes on what they think will be most effective in games, C.F. designed his around what worked best in practice, by dividing his schemes into the number of component parts equal to the number of coaches on the staff. His practices were extraordinarily demanding and superbly organized. He turned over their agenda to the student manager who carried a stopwatch and a whistle to signal the end of one section of practice and the beginning of the next. C.F. never forgot that football, like every sport, is played with the brain as well as the body. His schemes were brilliant deployments, interesting intellectually in their own right. I remember how fascinating my father, who never played football, found them when I explained them to him. C.F. made sure that every player understood the whole scheme, not just his part in it; he invited suggestions for improvement. The result was that coaches could take a player out of the game, ask him to analyze what was happening, and together they would make assignment changes on the spot.

But of all the ways C.F. blessed his players, there are two that stand out most vividly: That he played every player in every game, no matter how close. No exceptions. And he never talked about winning. That was not what the esence of the game was about. That’s not why he taught it. Besides, if we did everything right, as coaches and players, winning would take care of itself.

It did. After a few seasons of C.F.’s coaching, some of the teams we traditionally played dropped us from their schedules because they could no longer compete with us. We had to search out bigger schools than we were. We beat them too.

One day, C.F. came into my classroom to tell me he was a finalist candidate for the head coaching position at a college well-known for high academic standards and winning football. The search committee had hinted to him that he was the favorite.

“Wonderful, C.F.!” I said, jumping up from my desk to shake his hand. It was then I noticed that he was frowning. “It shows how excellent you are that a college would choose from the prep school ranks rather than one of their own,”" I told him.

“I think I’ll withdraw,” he said.

“Withdraw? Why?”

“I love it here.”

“You’ll love it there too. Think of the opportunity.”

“We love our house and this school. Our kids are happy here.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “But there’s more money there. You can buy even a nicer house.”

“Not if you lose. It’s college. You start losing and they fire you. You have to start all over.”

“C.F.! What would you say to one of your players if he talked like that?”

He flushed and looked away. “Forget that,” he said. “I was just cooking up an excuse. The truth is like I said: I love the kids and the community here and there’s still lots to do.”

“So why did you come in here and tell me?”

He shrugged. “So that maybe you could change my mind.”

“I haven’t, have I?”

“No. I’m going to stay. You and I will still be working together.”

“Not for long,” I said. “I’m already restless.”

Now I wish I’d asked him if he could imagine ten years out. Would he still love it here? Would he still be so excited? I didn’t ask those questions and he turned down the opportunity and the next year I left that school and went on to a new position in a new location. We moved out of the house my wife designed. She stood in the doorway of the empty house when the furniture was loaded in the truck, and said,”This is all I ever wanted.”

Years went by and lo and behold, the kid who had been the student manager came back to the school as a faculty member and worked his way up the chain, changing jobs every several years and was now the athletic director. On a visit I made to the school, he told me  that the school wasn’t winning football games anymore. Kids were going out for soccer instead. There were stories about C.F. yelling at his players. He was using the same schemes he’d employed when I was one of his assistants. “The other teams have caught on and their killing us,” the athletic director said. “He shows every sign of a person who has stayed in the same position too long.”  The next year, this man, not half C.F.’s age, who as a kid had carried his whistle and clipboard with C.F.’s  practice agenda, had the sad task of calling a man he revered into his office and taking away his coaching position. Last I heard, C.F stayed on at the school as a classroom teacher until he retired.

For the last ten years of his time at the school, he never went to a football game.