THIS PAST SUNDAY’S San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner featured a story on the dual collapses of Anderson Valley’s and Mendocino’s high school football programs. The two disasters were jumbled up in a manner that suggested substance abuse torpedoed both teams, which ain’t exactly the case.
ANDERSON VALLEY IS REAPING the rewards of years of deterioration at its high school; years of arbitrary enforcement of the rules, years of students at the mercy of people holding teaching jobs who dislike and fear adolescents, years of idiots in positions of authority. The only adult in the community that kids of the male persuasion relate to is Deputy Squires. You will note that kids don’t blow dope in his face or chew during practices or in any other way misbehave when Keith is around.
ANDERSON VALLEY ALSO HAS a hiring procedure whereby teachers and “members of the community” select new staff which in practice means you’ve got dingbats selecting their work mates. if the trustees and administrators would actually take charge and assume responsibility as they are supposed to do and cease being intimidated by the staff drones, we might be able to get some young, intelligent, vigorous new blood to work at the high school and, thereby, improve student morale.
DENNIS LANZE COACHES football at Mendocino High School. Mendocino High School is four times the size of Anderson Valley High School, incidentally and for the edification of Bay Area reporters. Lanze is getting a lot of heat and mistreatment for basically handling the dope problem in a fair and equitable manner. The Mendocino principal and its athletic director seem to be caving in to pressure from the Arkansas Travelers, Loot-the-Loop Thomas Loop, mad dog, semi-literate Fort Bragg and Caspar pundit, with a big assist from the editor of the Arkansas-owned Fort Bragg Advocate. Loop usually raves on about that old staple of rural paranoids everywhere, the international communist conspiracy. Loop, and the readers of the Advocate generally, belong to the largest conspiracy of all, the International Conspiracy of the Stupid. Loopy and friends would enjoy a public flogging of Lanze and his football team which of course would immediately cause America’s 60 million pot smokers to take up a healthier habit, like booze and tobacco. I’m surprised we haven’t heard from Frank Creasey on the subject of kids smoking pot on football trips. All the other north coast crack pots have put their two bits worth in.
LANZE TOOK THE SENSIBLE and sane approach to the episode of several of his players apparently smoking dope on a football trip. He talked to them. He told them he was disappointed in their behavior. He pointed out what the team had to lose which, in the case of Mendocino, was a lot including a possible trip to the playoffs. Coach Lanze then punished the offenders in the traditional football way, running laps. The case should have been closed right there. Enter self-righteousness in the form of people who have other axes to grind. The anti-pot commandos are ready to sacrifice everything for the cause. They’ll try to get people fired as they have tried to do to Lanze. They’ll trample on the Constitution. And they won’t hesitate to take out their frustrations on kids, like the low grade totalitarians they actually are.
DRUGS ARE A PLAGUE AND A CURSE on the land. I don’t know of any rational person who would disagree with that statement. Is the best way to combat drug use among the young to destroy the activities most likely to keep them away from drugs?
ANOTHER QUESTION I’d like to have the answer to: In a time when the typical high school graduate has trouble filling out a job application, what are tiny high schools doing with “athletic directors?” Anderson Valley has a high school student body of 86. The taxpayers should be funding an “athletic director” in a school this size? How about a “composition director?”
IT SHOULD ALSO BE SAID that high school athletes could become more responsible themselves. Naturally if you chew right in the principal’s face you are going to pay the price. Prep athletes could also lean on the shakier members of their various teams not to do the things that are going to hurt everyone else. I’ll always treasure the advice one of my college coaches gave me when I complained about a guy who had been stuck in my dorm room with me: The coach advised, “Sure he’s ugly, sure he stinks, sure he’s dumb, and sure he’s a pervert. Hell, we all know that. but you’ve got to try and help him get better.”
THERE’S HOPE for AVHS athletics. For the first time in years we have a couple of administrators who at least would like to make things better. Can you remember the last Superintendent who helped pour concrete, who used his own truck to drag the football field and who is actually coaching the junior high boy’s basketball team? No, you can’t because we haven’t ever had someone of Jim Johnson’s caliber in the job, that’s why. As they say in the sports world, “Way to go Jim baby.”
JERRY TOLMAN GOT a nice mention in the Press Plutocrat the other day when the writer described him as “rugged” among other things. Tolman is at last playing for a coach who knows what he’s doing. Coach Walker at Sonoma State has noted Tolman’s Willingness to give up the ball. Last year at SRJC, the coach seemed intimidated by the childish thugs who dominated his team and who, as soon as they got their hands on the ball, went straight for the hoop regardless of where they happened to find themselves on the floor. JT’s team starts the season against a bunch of Division One schools. It will be interesting to see how they do with their tallest starter at 6’4”.
I predict they’ll surprise a lot of teams by a combination of hustle and savvy even though Sonoma State is picked to finish last in their conference. It’s surprising how many college teams are poorly coached, but Sonoma State, fortunately, suffers no such handicap.
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