The Ballad of "Baggy"

Coaching middle school boys is…well, very different than coaching high school boys. My main duties as a middle school coach are to teach solid fundamentals and do all I can to keep as many boys as possible in the program. I’m expected to send as many players as I can up to the high school football team. The theory is that the more kids they have to pick from, the more good athletes they will be able to find. It makes sense if you think about it and it is good for me as it lessens the pressure to win every game on the middle school level. The drawback is that I’m expected to keep pretty much everybody. It is true that some kids who can’t walk and chew gum at the same time in middle school will blossom into good athletes in high school. However, I’ve found that 99.9% of the time a middle school spaz will grow into a high school spaz. This is the true story of one of those kids I had to endure knowing full well he would never play a down in high school.

“Baggy”, the nickname his fellow students bestowed upon him, was actually kind of a cute kid. He was very short and pudgy. He wore round glasses with black frames that made him look like a cross between an owl and Harry Potter (Sort of a mini Larry King). The lenses were very thick. The kid had the eyesight of a mole. He was a very poor athlete and, possibly, the slowest kid I’ve ever coached. I could have timed his forty yard dash with a sundial. The other kids picked on “Baggy” unmercifully. They were terrible to him. I don’t think a day went by that somebody didn’t pull “Baggy’s” underwear up to his neck. I really felt bad for him and tried to protect him as best I could. Then a funny thing happened. I realized that “Baggy” was a horrible little kid. He was rude, obnoxious, crude, and a general dill weed. The other kids didn’t pick on him because he was some little helpless nerd. They were just retaliating for some terrible thing “Baggy” had said to them.

As the season went on I still had to protect “Baggy”. This kid could not keep his mouth shut and all my other players wanted to kill him. I was often tempted to put “Baggy” into some sort of practice drill where he would get what was coming to him, but I didn’t. I’d like to say it was my superior morality that prevented me from doing this but it was more my fear of lawyers. Anyway, the season progressed and I managed to keep “Baggy” alive. I even managed to get him into each game for a play or two.

Our second to last game was against a team from across town. I hated away games that year because I had to sit next to “Baggy”. I had to do this to protect him from the horde in the back of the bus that wanted to do him much bodily harm. I REALLY did not enjoy his company on these bus rides. Well, we arrived and the game began. Needless to say, “Baggy” did not play early in games when the outcome was still in doubt. He typically played one play a game toward the end of the fourth quarter once it was clear which way the game would go. This game was different, however, as we were a lot better than our opponents and got out to a big lead in the first half. So, I put “Baggy” in at cornerback for the last play of the second quarter (CB is a good place to hide a bad athlete in middle school as most teams don’t throw often). The opposing coach took one look at him and called a sweep to his side of the field. Their running back was a big guy and took dead aim at “Baggy” in the flat. Now the poor kid was terrified and completely frozen in his tracks. Their running back could have easily gone around him. However, he lowered his shoulder and collided head on with “Baggy”. At the point of contact their seemed to be some kind of explosion. Small colorful objects flew in all directions. I really thought “Baggy” had blown up and his innards were being propelled all over the field. As “Baggy” lay on the field like a slug, I saw he was, in fact, completely intact. However, Smarties, Sweettarts, and Butterfingers surrounded his limp body. It seems “Baggy” tended to get hungry during games and had stuffed candy in his uniform pants to snack on while waiting for his one play. The referee never even blew the whistle to end the play. He just stood over the prostrate body of “Baggy” and softly said, “Unbelievable.”

The quality of football might not be as good in middle school as it is in high school. Nor do we play in huge beautiful stadiums. But I do know one thing. You will never see a fourth string cornerback blow up like a piñata on a Friday night in Texas. That sort of fun is reserved for Tuesday afternoons only.

My best…