Emptying out the brainpan while wondering why there’s snow in my yard …
An athletic department without an athletic director is like a tree without roots, but it appears Hartford High is set on being the odd twig in the forest.
The Hartford School District plans to lay off five employees at the end of the school year to help with a $1.1 million budget deficit, a group that includes longtime AD Joe James. James told Valley News writer Matt Hongoltz-Hetling recently that he believes his duties will be spread among the high school’s principal, assistant principal and director of student services next fall.
Three people taking over the work once done by one. That alone should tell you what a bad idea this is.
What does a high school AD do? Hire, fire and review coaches for dozens of teams. Go to state scheduling meetings. Represent the school on state athletic association committees. Order new equipment and uniforms. Oversee field maintenance. Hire subvarsity officials and game support staff. Deal with parents, a responsibility that should come with combat pay at Hartford. Serve as administration presence at home games. And that’s just the stuff I could conjure up on my first cup of coffee.
James ships emails about Project Graduation events at Hartford, so he obviously has a hand in that. I saw him at the Barre Auditorium last month selling commemorative state basketball tournament T-shirts, presumably volunteering his time to do so.
I get that it wasn’t an easy decision. I’m sure the changing school funding scenario at the state level forced the district’s hand. I don’t suspect there’s a hard heart involved in this call. What I don’t get is how Hartford thinks this will work.
South Royalton did something similar last year by giving AD responsibilities to Frank Romeo, an assistant principal. You can do that at a smaller school flitting between Divisions III and IV, where there are a minimal number of teams per season. But such a move results in just one more thing on a busy person’s plate, and athletics won’t be the first priority. An athletic director gets to athletics first because that’s his job.
Now multiply the sports load by at least three or four, and that’s what Hartford’s three-headed AD will face in the fall. A principal, assistant principal or director of student services has more important roles to fill than scheduler of football contests or liner of fields or nighttime game administrator. And all this to cut one man’s salary?
Good luck with that, Hartford.
When he first arrived in 1984, Paul Cormier carried with him the momentum built from working at a soon-to-be NCAA champion at Villanova, aiming to make Dartmouth men’s basketball competitive in the Ivy League. When he returned in 2010, Cormier’s task was to rescue the Big Green from the morass of frequent defeat both inside the league and out.
He succeeded both times. It’ll be a shame that he won’t get to help Dartmouth take the first steps in the Ancient Eight’s foray into a conference tournament, having been unexpectedly fired earlier this week.
Say this about sixth-year Dartmouth athletic director Harry Sheehy: He’s consistent. He’s maintained that he’ll change coaches if he feels a program is sliding and can do better. Sheehy’s closer to the situation than I am, but having known Cormier for most of my time here and having worked with him on a radio show waaaaaay back during his first coaching tenure, I believe he deserved to get that shot at the first Ivy men’s basketball tourney.
What’s also consistent about Sheehy: He’ll take his time to find a replacement, and it will probably be a young up-and-comer with few, if any, ties to the college. Some of Sheehy’s significant hires have been just that — softball, men’s soccer (an internal choice), women’s basketball, to name a few — and all have either shot to the top of the Ivies or have at least begun to make a decent impression.
But Sheehy has his hands full: In addition to men’s basketball, he has coaching vacancies in women’s hockey, women’s volleyball, swimming and, with veteran Ruff Patterson’s retirement this week, Nordic skiing as well.
Johan Cruyff made me a soccer fan. So it was with sadness that I read of his death on Thursday at the age of 68 from lung cancer.
Obituaries everywhere will note his contributions to his original Dutch club, Ajax, along with Spanish giant Barcelona and the Netherlands national team. (Silly me: I named my intramural college soccer teams AY-jax in his honor, not knowing the correct pronunciation was EYE-ax.) They’ll cite his playing philosophies that still affect the game today, his many awards (three-time FIFA world player of the year) and his managerial resume (four Spanish La Liga titles and a UEFA Champions League crown at Barca).
But many will overlook this important tidbit: In the prime of his career at age 32, Cruyff came to the U.S. for parts of three summers to play in the old North American Soccer League, first with the Los Angeles Aztecs in 1979 and then with the Washington Diplomats in 1980 and ’81. As a Maryland teenager, I saw nearly every one of his RFK Stadium matches in ’80, as well as one in Minnesota, and it gave me the chance to witness greatness.
Take a moment to visit YouTube and type “Johan Cruyff Washington Diplomats Seattle Sounders” into the search box. Your first hit should be a two-minute video of Cruyff scoring one of the prettiest goals you’ll ever see. It’s a 1980 home match; I saw it from the opposite side of the field from camera view. Cruyff takes a deflected ball in midfield, a nothing situation, then proceeds to split two sets of defenders and beat the Seattle goalkeeper on a 50-yard dribble run.
All displayed to the accompaniment of David Bowie’s Starman.
Pardon me. I’m going to go have a cry.
Greg Fennell can be reached at gfennell@vnews.com or 603-727-3226.