On the morning of March 25, the high school baseball coach pulled out his phone and reached out to his players, because that is what he has always done early on a game day.
He reminded them that it was opening day of their season, against Clarkstown North. They needed to be ready. The weather was going to be 50 degrees and cloudy, a decent day, he said. Let’s go win the game.
It didn’t take long for the players to text him back, reminding him that their season had been postponed indefinitely because of the coronavirus pandemic. There was no game.
I know, he told them. But as always, Coach Mike Chiapparelli had a plan.
“I’m playing the whole game in my head,” said Chiapparelli, who has been coaching baseball, hockey and football at Mamaroneck High School in the New York City suburbs for the better part of 40 years. “And they should, too, because that way when we get back we’ll be ready.”
The pandemic has killed thousands, turned arenas and parks into temporary hospitals and sent the world’s financial markets crashing. It has also upended lives and schedules in countless ways, with effects that range from the deadly to the more mundane.
The people who have dedicated their adult lives to coaching know where their problems fall on that scale. But those “lifers” — the high school baseball coach who has been at it since the Carter administration, the lacrosse coach who started the program in 1976 — are also suddenly doing something that they have not done in decades, which is to say, almost nothing.
They’re not teaching all day and then throwing batting practice, or raking the infield, or running stick handling drills, or dispensing unspoken life lessons, all afternoon.
Their lives are fairly simple to understand. Bankers make money. Lawyers make arguments. Novelists make stories. Coaches — teachers, too — make people, and without all those practices and games that were supposed to unfold over the next couple months, it doesn’t feel like they are making much of anything right now.
“The hardest thing is giving up the relationships you build and what you give the girls, the confidence,” said Kathy Jenkins, who has been teaching and coaching at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School, in Alexandria, Va., since 1971. “I keep telling myself thank God I didn’t decide to retire after this year.”
Jenkins will turn 70 in October. She started out as a basketball coach, then began the girls’ lacrosse program in 1976, half a lifetime ago.
Last year she won her 800th game, more than any other girls’ lacrosse coach.
“I have more time than I have ever had in my life now,” she said. “I don’t like it.”
On March 13, the governor announced he was closing the schools and ending scholastic sports.
Her girls came out to the field in their uniforms that afternoon anyway. They played music, and the underclassmen gave roses to the veterans, so the seniors would have something resembling a senior day.
“That’s when I began knowing in my mind we probably weren’t going to be together like this again,” she said.
Jack Radovich, the 17-year-old center fielder for Chiapparelli’s Mamaroneck Tigers, said after baseball practices got shut down on that same Friday the 13th, he and his teammates tried to gather in small groups to throw and swing. One of them even has a batting cage in his backyard. Those gatherings got shut down pretty quickly by parents and school administrators.
“For me, it’s not so much a team or a season that we’ve lost, it’s more of a family,” said Radovich, bored at home on another recent baseball-free afternoon. “Coach creates this team dynamic, this bond, and for that to be broken, I’m getting kind of choked up talking about it.”
Chiapparelli, 64, who has a mop of shaggy curls on his head and still wears those tight, mid-length gym teacher shorts nearly every day, even in the winter, didn’t plan on any of this when he was starting out in coaching and teaching physical education 40 years ago. He spent 32 years coaching three sports, then dialed it back to just hockey and baseball after his wife asked him to, though he still helps out on the sidelines of varsity football games on Saturday afternoons in the fall.
The programs were fairly mediocre when he took them over, but he joined the board of the local Little League and tried to make it a little more competitive, encouraging better players to play in older divisions. He also started after-school floor hockey and baseball programs in the district’s elementary schools, giving him an early look at the best athletes in town.
He paid his high school players to coach the children and used the rest of the money to help improve the facilities and opportunities for his high school teams. They got batting cages and bullpens and spring trips to tournaments against other nationally ranked teams, plus some sweet swag — batting gloves, polo shirts, sweatshirts.
His players also do off-season weight training and conditioning in the mornings before school. He joins them for five-mile runs several mornings a week. His team is the grounds crew. They rake the infield and manicure the pitching mound and home plate and roll out the tarp when bad weather is coming.
In the early 1990s, he started scheduling games against the best teams in New York, teams that battered his Tigers at first. Now his teams regularly contend for state championships.
“I’m not afraid to lose, and that’s what I tell the kids,” he said. “When you put yourself up against the tougher challenge you get used to having tougher challenges.”
Since the season got put on an indefinite hold, he has cleaned up his yard and done all the early spring chores around the house. He usually works Sunday nights tending bar at a local tavern, but that isn’t happening either. Now he’s just bored, a guy who is used to having five jobs, who now barely has one. He should be throwing a thousand pitches a day for live batting practice, because hitting a ball out of a machine just isn’t the same, but he’s got no one to throw to. And nothing fills the hole of what’s really missing.
“The camaraderie,” he said. “I text them all the time.”
He messages the juniors one day, then the seniors the next, keeps telling them he knows somehow they are going to get to play baseball this year. Maybe it’s a two-week tournament in the summer. Maybe its 20 games in 25 days beginning in the middle of May — 17 of the 30 guys on his roster can pitch, he said, and don’t think he hasn’t scratched out a rotation.
“He keeps saying, ‘Stay ready, the Tigers are coming,’” said Aaron Cox, 17, the team’s third baseman. “It’s helpful because most of the stuff we hear is so negative.”
Chiapparelli is approaching his 600th win in baseball. He figured that milestone was going to come this year. He isn’t giving up.
“I feel like we are going to get something,” he said. “We are going to figure out how to beat this stuff.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/sports/coronavirus-coaches-high-school-leagues.html
2020-04-10 09:06:47Z
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