dogdad
02-11-2007, 11:59 AM
SPORTSDAY Columnist:
Kevin Sherrington
Just a game? Hardly
Life lessons trump sports for Giddings coaching duo
06:00 PM CST on Saturday, February 10, 2007
Sandy Brown has coached in Giddings, Texas, for 27 years, longer than most high school coaches last in one place, far longer than he intended.
"I suppose not having to deal with parents helps," he says.
Maybe he doesn't sense the irony. Maybe he does. You don't coach a quarter century at the Giddings State School and not hear the stories.
Giddings is the Texas Youth Commission's "high-restriction facility." Kids don't end up here for breaking a few windows.
Brown doesn't read their profiles. He doesn't want to know. But he hears. And he sees.
One day a kid's shooting baskets in the gym, his shirt off, and Brown notices small round scars on his shoulders. Dozens of them.
Brown asks what happened, and the kid says, "When I was little, my stepdad liked to put out his cigarettes on me."
The kid shot his stepfather, so they sent him to Giddings, where his story isn't all that unusual.
Once out of Giddings, they may go home, back to the "free," as they call the free world, or they might end up at a federal penitentiary.
But while they're at Giddings, they're still kids. Every morning at 7:30, they're in class. At 4:30 p.m., they get a 90-minute break.
And during the break, if after a couple of years they've proven themselves trustworthy, they can go out for football or basketball or track.
Giddings competes in the second-largest classification of the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools, or TAPPS, even though it has fewer than 400 students, and only 20 percent are eligible by school standards.
Every August, Brown starts with 25 to 30 football players. He usually ends up with 13 or 14. One game last fall, he had to suit up the manager.
The reason for the turnover? Lost a quarterback once because it was time for him to go to the pen.
And sometimes, they simply go free.
"If their release date is in October," Brown says, "they're not hanging around until November just to play football."
Still, Brown and his assistant, Lester Ward, make do. They've won state football titles in 1996, 1997 and 2001.
Ward, who played at Baylor, has been at Giddings for 25 years. Brown won't call him his assistant. They're "co-coaches" in everything. Ward heads up the football and track teams, and Brown runs basketball.
"We function as partners," Brown says. "He's my best friend. We'll argue over stuff, but he's got integrity. He's someone you can depend on and trust."
Those qualities are important at Giddings. By the time kids end up there, the adults in their lives have probably already failed them.
"These kids aren't much different from any other kids," Brown says, "only they never had a chance."
Brown and Ward give them one. And it's not wasted. No athlete has attempted an escape while they've been at the school.
The standards are higher than you'd think. Athletes have been held out of competitions because they didn't do their homework.
But Brown knows what people may think. After a sympathetic story on Giddings came out in Sports Illustrated in the mid-1990s, an Austin radio station asked the rhetorical question: Should these kids be allowed to play?
"I figured we were dead," Brown says.
The reaction? Ninety percent positive. He attributes it to the state's reverence for football and the exemplary conduct of his athletes.
And he makes an excellent point: You can lock 'em up, but you can't throw away the key. They're getting out some day – most of them, anyway – and they need to come out better than they went in.
Or as Brown says, "We need to fix 'em."
They appear to be doing just that. A California journalist spent a few months inside Giddings a couple of years ago for a book, Last Chance in Texas. The author, John Hubner, credits the work of Brown and Ward as well as others in affecting the state's lowest recidivism rate among youth offenders.
And a national nonprofit organization out of Stanford, the Positive Coaching Alliance, recently cited Hubner's work when it named Brown and Ward winners of its "double goal" award for "striving to win while teaching life lessons."
Brown and Ward can tell you how much they like winning. But it's not what has kept them at Giddings all these years.
"The first time we won the state championship, it wasn't that big a deal, to tell you the truth," Brown says. "The feeling lasts about a week.
"But every year, two or three of the kids we've had stop by to see us. They tell us about their families and their jobs and how well they're doing.
"That's why we're still here."
Kevin Sherrington
Just a game? Hardly
Life lessons trump sports for Giddings coaching duo
06:00 PM CST on Saturday, February 10, 2007
Sandy Brown has coached in Giddings, Texas, for 27 years, longer than most high school coaches last in one place, far longer than he intended.
"I suppose not having to deal with parents helps," he says.
Maybe he doesn't sense the irony. Maybe he does. You don't coach a quarter century at the Giddings State School and not hear the stories.
Giddings is the Texas Youth Commission's "high-restriction facility." Kids don't end up here for breaking a few windows.
Brown doesn't read their profiles. He doesn't want to know. But he hears. And he sees.
One day a kid's shooting baskets in the gym, his shirt off, and Brown notices small round scars on his shoulders. Dozens of them.
Brown asks what happened, and the kid says, "When I was little, my stepdad liked to put out his cigarettes on me."
The kid shot his stepfather, so they sent him to Giddings, where his story isn't all that unusual.
Once out of Giddings, they may go home, back to the "free," as they call the free world, or they might end up at a federal penitentiary.
But while they're at Giddings, they're still kids. Every morning at 7:30, they're in class. At 4:30 p.m., they get a 90-minute break.
And during the break, if after a couple of years they've proven themselves trustworthy, they can go out for football or basketball or track.
Giddings competes in the second-largest classification of the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools, or TAPPS, even though it has fewer than 400 students, and only 20 percent are eligible by school standards.
Every August, Brown starts with 25 to 30 football players. He usually ends up with 13 or 14. One game last fall, he had to suit up the manager.
The reason for the turnover? Lost a quarterback once because it was time for him to go to the pen.
And sometimes, they simply go free.
"If their release date is in October," Brown says, "they're not hanging around until November just to play football."
Still, Brown and his assistant, Lester Ward, make do. They've won state football titles in 1996, 1997 and 2001.
Ward, who played at Baylor, has been at Giddings for 25 years. Brown won't call him his assistant. They're "co-coaches" in everything. Ward heads up the football and track teams, and Brown runs basketball.
"We function as partners," Brown says. "He's my best friend. We'll argue over stuff, but he's got integrity. He's someone you can depend on and trust."
Those qualities are important at Giddings. By the time kids end up there, the adults in their lives have probably already failed them.
"These kids aren't much different from any other kids," Brown says, "only they never had a chance."
Brown and Ward give them one. And it's not wasted. No athlete has attempted an escape while they've been at the school.
The standards are higher than you'd think. Athletes have been held out of competitions because they didn't do their homework.
But Brown knows what people may think. After a sympathetic story on Giddings came out in Sports Illustrated in the mid-1990s, an Austin radio station asked the rhetorical question: Should these kids be allowed to play?
"I figured we were dead," Brown says.
The reaction? Ninety percent positive. He attributes it to the state's reverence for football and the exemplary conduct of his athletes.
And he makes an excellent point: You can lock 'em up, but you can't throw away the key. They're getting out some day – most of them, anyway – and they need to come out better than they went in.
Or as Brown says, "We need to fix 'em."
They appear to be doing just that. A California journalist spent a few months inside Giddings a couple of years ago for a book, Last Chance in Texas. The author, John Hubner, credits the work of Brown and Ward as well as others in affecting the state's lowest recidivism rate among youth offenders.
And a national nonprofit organization out of Stanford, the Positive Coaching Alliance, recently cited Hubner's work when it named Brown and Ward winners of its "double goal" award for "striving to win while teaching life lessons."
Brown and Ward can tell you how much they like winning. But it's not what has kept them at Giddings all these years.
"The first time we won the state championship, it wasn't that big a deal, to tell you the truth," Brown says. "The feeling lasts about a week.
"But every year, two or three of the kids we've had stop by to see us. They tell us about their families and their jobs and how well they're doing.
"That's why we're still here."