Parental advisory
Area coaches say their relationship with parents has never been worse. SVN assistant sports editor Will Larkin investigates. Steve Sandholm sits behind his desk in his office at Dixon High School. His day looks typical. The door opens and shuts rhythmically, with students and coaches shuffling in and out. It's another blustery day in a dreary spring sports season. The phone rarely leaves the ear of athletic assistant Kenda Bailey, who is making and taking calls about the status of the afternoon's events. Despite the appearances on this day, these days are anything but typical for Sandholm. The 32-year coaching veteran is under much scrutiny. A large group of detractors in his own town say he is unfit to keep his jobs as athletic director and boys basketball coach. A conduct code was put in place in response to the large group that attended the March 19 Dixon school board meeting in organized protest of Sandholm's behavior. The 57-year-old coach still believes he could be fired. "I can't sleep at night," Sandholm said. "I get up seven or eight times, and it's not to go to the bathroom." Sandholm just finished coaching his ninth year at Dixon. Many Dukes supporters don't want him to see a 10th. Sandholm says he can't listen to the radio these days, but he knows what's been said about him on the local airwaves. Anyone who doesn't can visit the www.savedixonsports.com Web site. One click reveals in no uncertain terms what four Dixon residents think of the Dukes' coach. One click, and the voices of Glen Hughes, Al Knickrehm, Rich Kuecker and Mike Venier come to life. Kuecker, Hughes and Venier are fathers of boys Sandholm recently has coached. Knickrehm is general manager of WIXN-AM 1460, the station that has aired the anti-Sandholm content. The fathers, who feel their sons' varsity experiences were diminished by their coach, state their case for a few minutes. Knickrehm gets to the point. "Let's take up a collection, get some luggage for the guy and ship him off someplace else," Knickrehm said. "Would that be accurate?" The fathers chuckle in unison. - Hughes, Kuecker and Venier are not alone. One-hundred-fifty people signed Kuecker's petition suggesting Dixon look for a new coach and athletic director, and at least that many attended the school board meeting to support Kuecker's stance. Sandholm's not alone, either. Since the basketball season ended less than a month ago, it seems no job is safe. At Riverdale, Brent Carmichael was let go after a 16-14 season, one year after the Rams won 20 games in consecutive seasons for the first time since 1974 and 1975. Carmichael said disgruntled parents were behind his firing, a charge dismissed as untrue by the Riverdale school board. Brian Hutton coached the Sherrard boys for 14 years before the school board failed to renew his contract. At Moline, Jon Nedelcoff was fired after two years on the job. He brought a 227-93 record with him from the Wisconsin prep ranks, and the Maroons were 15-9 this season. The school board asked for his resignation. When Nedelcoff refused, he was fired. Coaches across northwest Illinois are keeping a close eye on Sandholm's situation. If the parents succeed in forcing him out, they wonder, who's next? "I don't think anybody's safe," said Sheila Mammosser, who has coached the Rock Falls volleyball team for 10 years and coached the softball team for three from 2004-06. "It doesn't matter if you've been there 20 years or two years. If you get enough parents against you, you can be gone." Mammosser knows what it's like to stay after the game, explaining herself to disgruntled parents. During a disappointing baseball season two springs ago, Sterling coach Darwin Nettleton faced a line of parents after almost every game. For most coaches, such experiences have become part of the job. Mike Papoccia has coached football at Newman since 1980. He's also the Comets' athletic director and girls basketball coach. He says he's never seen parents critique prep coaches as they do now. In the past five or six years, Papoccia has gathered each of Newman's sports parents together at the beginning of a season, telling them to interfere as little as possible with the Comets coaches. "We don't tell you how to be accountants, lawyers, doctors, whatever," Papoccia said. "We expect that same respect." "That's a really good and up-front way of handling it," Rich Kuecker said. "I've never suggested that parents should be able to tell a coach how to run his team. Coaches don't need that." - Parent movements seem to be gaining traction, but they are nothing new in the world of high school sports. Glenn McPherson resigned from Dixon in the middle of the 1987-88 season amid pressure from parents and a one-day players' boycott of practice. In 1997, according to the Quad City Times, Orion's school board - after five hours of executive session - voted 4-3 to retain boys basketball coach Jay Bizarri, who was under fire by a group of parents. Eleven years later, Bizarri was the only member of Sherrard's board to vote against firing Hutton. Hoosiers - a film set in 1954 and released in 1986 - revolves around a scene in which a small-school basketball coach is nearly run out of town by an angry group of parents and fans, only to be saved by the support of the team's star player. Current coaches know that if they find themselves in a similar situation, Jimmy Chitwood probably won't be there to bail them out. "All of us are in that vulnerable position every year," said Don Robinson, who has coached girls basketball and track at Prophetstown for 31 years. "We might get let go for any number of reasons, and that's just the nature of the business. You just have to be confident in yourself that you're doing things the right way." Until recently, coaches didn't have to deal with Internet message boards. In the modern version of the Wild West, anonymous posters can take potshots at whomever they please without consequence. The Web can also be used as an effective organizing tool for a group of parents with a grudge - legitimate or not. The movement against Sandholm at Dixon was aided by YouTube videos showing his behavior during timeouts. The clips are labeled Coaching 101 and Coaching 302. Both were posted by a user named "RockRiverVideo". "If they get rid of me over this, every parent's going to be like Dick Clark on American Bandstand," Sandholm said. "Everybody's going to have their own little video." "Those message boards can just get crazy," Oregon track and golf coach Jim Spratt added. "You can have one guy posting under seven different names and it looks like there's this big group saying the same thing. You just have to take it with a grain of salt. I don't even look at them anymore." Spratt resigned as Oregon's basketball coach a year ago after a miserable 2006-07 season. The 5-22 campaign followed a summer in which Spratt was the focus of a group of parents organized against him, saying he favored his son. When the dust settled with Spratt still in place as the Hawks coach, two starters transferred to other Sauk Valley schools. "Nobody came out a winner in that one," Spratt said. "It was a real shame for everybody involved." Basketball coaches like Spratt and Sandholm seem to come under more scrutiny than their counterparts in other sports. Hoops coaches point to the number of games as one reason, along with the proximity of the crowd to the action. "We're in a fishbowl," Sandholm said. "Things go on that are much worse during a football game, but the crowd's far away and can't see it or hear it. In a basketball game they're right on top of you, so you better watch yourself." - The leader of the current parent movement at Dixon takes pains to differentiate that situation from other recent uprisings. Rich Kuecker doesn't know much about the circumstances at Moline, Riverdale and Sherrard, but he believes it would be misleading to lump what's happening at Dixon in with them. "People say, 'Oh, these parents need to cut the umbilical cord,' " Kuecker said. "They're missing the point. If a coach has his players doing push-ups out in the mud till after dark, or yells at them to do a better job, that's fine with me. But yelling at him just to humiliate him, telling him he's stupid, telling him he's out of shape, that's where I draw the line." Sauk Valley Newspapers conducted an anonymous poll last week, asking varsity athletes what they thought of parents' involvement in high school sports. Eighty students from 12 schools responded, with 51 saying parents are involved at an appropriate level. Sixteen said they are not involved enough, and 13 say they are too involved. Twenty-nine said parents should have the power to fire a coach; 44 said they should not. Seven weren't sure. Some coaches say there is a time and a place for parents to voice their concerns to a coach. Others say they never deal with parents, preferring to hear any complaints from the players themselves. All agree there is a line that must not be crossed. Few agree where that line is located. "If you have a problem with a coach's ethics or morals, then I think it's certainly appropriate for that to come into play," Papoccia said. "If that's the case, you should get involved. But again, people have to realize we're not perfect and we will make mistakes. "To me, yelling at your kid isn't enough for a school-board meeting." The high cost of athletic participation has raised the stakes for parents, many of whom spend thousands of dollars on out-of-school club teams and camps. Some see a college scholarship as a way of recouping that investment, and a coach sometimes is seen as an obstacle keeping that from happening. "There's so much more money involved each year," said Spratt, who has coached high school sports for 25 years. "My kids were in it, too. Then the season rolls around and, 'What the heck did I spend all this money for if my kid's not starting?' Then you run into a problem." "We've gotten away from thinking about the kids as a team," Don Robinson added. "Now the parents tend to think of their kid as an individual. I've always thought that being part of a team was something valuable in and of itself, but people are getting away from that kind of thinking." Once a parent movement starts, it is easy to join and tough to stop. Kathy Ross is one of Sandholm's supporters in Dixon. Her son, Matt Ross, started for the Dukes this season as a sophomore. Kathy said she originally aligned herself with Sandholm's detractors after being influenced by their growing number and volume. "I didn't really agree with them, but it's easy to go along with what everybody's saying," Ross said. "Deep down I wasn't proud of myself, but I went along to get along." - Most long-time area coaches say the overall tenor of the coach-parent relationship has never been worse. If things don't change for the better, the prognoses they give range from the depressing to the downright gruesome. "To be honest, I don't know how many high schools are going to have teams in 15, 20 years," Spratt said in a statement echoed by Sandholm. "I think it's going to evolve to club basketball, club volleyball, club football, all that type of stuff. It might get to the point where the schools say it's just not worth it." "I talk about it with my fellow coaches all the time," Papoccia said. "I told one the other day that I don't think this is going to end until some parent goes nuts and shoots and kills a coach. I hope I'm dead wrong on that, but that's what I foresee happening if things don't change." Most coaches and parents have to think for a bit when asked what the ideal relationship between the two sides should be. When they answer, a similar conclusion is usually reached. "Mutual respect is the best thing you can have," Spratt said. "I understand your job is to raise your kids, and you're going to do the best you can. I hope you understand that I'm trying to help your kid, and I have their best interest at heart." "The biggest thing is that the coaches and parents know each other and respect each other," Kuecker said. "In my mind, it's as simple as that."
