Audiobook read
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
I started coaching just to give me something to do. I wasn't married at the time and there's only so much going on in Wayne and the small stipend I got for coaching was a way to earn a little money and occupy my evenings. I wasn't overly qualified for the job, but there wasn't exactly a lot of competition. It's not enough money to justify the effort. Did I play football? I had a basic understanding of the game but not much. I stopped my freshman year to play trombone in the band, but it's a lot like how nobody ever asked to see your college degree. Once I started coaching, everybody assumed I ate, drank and slept football my whole life, my first year as a coach, I started mainly as a babysitter, making sure the kids weren't slacking off on their drills and breaking up fights. Football is such an adrenaline pack game. You get dust ups between kids who are best friends. I remember feeling kind of out of place among the coaches, especially that crusty old curmudgeon Frank Markham. He was the kind of guy who would leave the door open while he relieved himself all while telling you about how, when he played football, they made you take salt pills and deny your water because they thought it'd make you weak. About midway through the first year I started to get interested in coaching football. The team had gelled into something of a tribe and it's hard to understand unless you've been a part of a team that spends five days a week together. It develops like a wolf pack with members coming to understand their roles in the pecking order. The different thing about a football team is there's room for more than one alpha that year. Our offense was sputtering and coach Kilgore asked for my thoughts one day before practice, I told him, give me a few days, I'd get back with him. I think he was just talking to himself more than really asking a question. But I took a good look at the part of the playbook we ran most often did some research, applied some basic models to the approach and came back with several pages of notes and tweaks to the plays. Didn't help, but Jerry appreciated the effort over the years. I've caught on quite a bit and grown to enjoy it. Not as much as my teaching, but quite a lot. Funny thing about math and computer science is that you're more likely to find a dime in the rough in the classroom than on the football field. Even at Wayne, we have an excellent computer lab while we have internet in most of the county, some remote areas don't have much service. There's a lot of our school district where cell towers just don't reach also. The expense is just more than some families can afford. So, a well equipped computer lab with printers is critical to helping kids in the county keep up. Students can use the lab for homework and research colleges or jobs and kids use the computers almost without pause during the school hours. I'm pretty flexible when it comes to letting kids do any project they're interested in if they are available machines and no one is waiting to work on class assignments. A couple of kids are mixing a rap album, just what the world needs. A redneck urban rap album about the Mean Streets of Echo and selling dried ragweed on the corner of Route 1 52 and Craig Road. One kid's gotten interested in animation. A couple of kids are trying to get a handle on A I I look in on them but don't have time to camp over their shoulders. Social media was blocked at our computers years ago. Kids do that on their phones anyways, but the computers are always busy. Froggy Robert Jenkins is one kid. I wish I had kept a closer eye on. Everyone thought he was just the class clown, but it was a facade. I'll never know whether he developed it on his home or school system. But he created a sort of cookie that attached itself to the social media profiles of anyone who used the school computer lab. In other words, almost everyone at Wayne High School, here's how it worked. Any time a user liked a photo on Facebook or Instagram, it automatically posted a comment from your profile that read that one's going into the old Spank bank. Everyone who looked at the social feed could see the photo in the comment, but the person who initially liked the image couldn't, I'm embarrassed to admit that I finally found it because I was cruising Facebook and liked one of my sister's photos of my nieces. She called me confused and asked me what a spank bank was. I asked her to send me a screenshot anyway, by the time I figured it out, it had been running on our computers for about 10 days and some tech blogs had discovered it. Froggy Robert didn't get expelled. He got a scholarship offer from M I T. I think he'll make it work if he doesn't get homesick. A front page article in the Wayne County news talked about the local whiz kid who had landed a scholarship. No mention of the Spank Bank cookie. So briefly, Froggie Robert Jenkins was the most famous kid at Wayne. We don't get a lot of famous out at Wayne, a state legislator, a judge here and there we had a pitcher, John Atkins who spent a couple of years with the Chicago White Sox. A mccoy Girl hit it reasonably big time as a backup singer for Confederate Railroad. A popular country band. Maybe the best brush with fame Wayne enjoyed was that Paul Newman spent time here to work on his Appalachian dialect for his role as Cool Hand Luke Vaudeville stripper. Blaze Star was also born in Wayne County in the late 19 eighties. They made a movie called Blaze about her affair with Louisiana, Governor Earl Kemp. Long starring Get This.