Catching up with what your favorite coach did this summer
Used to be a high school football coach brought in the troops for doubles, directed the mandated nine weeks of the regular season and, if lucky, a couple more when playoffs debuted in 1974.
He then collected helmets, pads and whichever jerseys the seniors didn't steal, focused on his course curriculum, maybe took an odd job in the summer, and figured soon enough he'd be greeted by juniors hungry to beat out the returning lettermen.
Seven-on-seven leagues? Never heard of 'em. Junior tape? Didn't think so. Off-season conditioning? A 6-minute mile, 100-pound bench and you were in.
Things have changed since contact days meant slamming aspirin after a bad loss.
All right, that's Contac. Same deal. Nowadays coaching prep football is a year-round proposition.
"I didn't really have a summer vacation," said Mike Fields, who needed closure at former employer Geneva High School before diving right in with his new charges at St. Charles East.
"By the time it started, I'd really fallen behind."
The modern prep coach still requires some sort of valve release even if, as with Mike and Mary Fields, it constitued "a couple" Cubs games or a day - one day - in South Haven, Mich.
"Man, the summer went fast," said Geneva coach Rob Wicinski.
Although most of the Kane County coaches said they had about a week away from football - Marmion's Dan Thorpe headed work on a new weight room, innovatively putting the old gear near the field for impromptu lifting - one said, upon reflection, he didn't realize all the things he did.
Travel, of course, was the preferred diversion. In fact, both Wicinski and Aurora Christian's Don Beebe targeted the same hot-weather site, Siesta Key in Sarasota, Fla. Wicinski and Thorpe each took their families to Disney World in Orlando.
The Thorpes have done it every year since 1991, luxuriating amid the 107-degree heat index. The Wicinskis haven't gone in a decade, so only one of their three girls, 17-year-old Lauren, remembers her dad's advice:
"Please keep your hands inside the ride at all times."
There were time-honored destinations. Kaneland coach Tom Fedderly's reunion with his brothers in the Wisconsin Dells where they were raised. Batavia coach Mike Gaspari's frozen custard-laden week in Door County. On the way up he managed to convince his wife, Marcia, and 23-year-old daughter Andrea to stop at the Green Bay Packers' new training facility for the first day of camp. Son Noel, a quarterback, needed no bribe.
"Just to watch practice is motivational, and neat for my son, too," Mike said.
Speaking of Packers, Aurora Christian's Beebe runs a frequent-fly pattern between speaking engagements in places like North Dakota, the 38th annual family shindig in Minnesota and overseeing 20 new House of Speed franchises added nationwide over the last year and a half.
"Life slows down for me now," he said. "Once football season starts I'm much more structured, much more regimented."
West Aurora's Buck Drach - an 11-handicap golfer who finished an "unheard of" third in his league at Blackberry Oaks - went to Surf City, N.C., near the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base where his son-in-law, Rob Graham, is stationed. On May 28, Drach's daughter, Emily, had delivered the coach's second grandchild. Drach cradled Elle for the first time - a highlight of a lifetime.
That Myrtle Beach-area setting is famous but accessible. Aruba, 16 miles off the Venezuelan coast, is an exotic locale most of us see only in Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue. OK, some of us.
St. Charles North coach Mark Gould and his wife, Lori, have had a timeshare there since 1986. Enjoying the typically arid, 86-degree climate they pal around with friendly locals, read pool-side - Gould devoured Ohio State coach Jim Tressel's "The Winner's Manual: For the Game of Life" - and hit nightspots.
"We just kind of point our finger in a direction and say, 'Let's go, see what happens,'" Mark said.
Then there's Aurora Central Catholic coach Mike Curry. Between limited finances, picking up seasonal summer jobs, raising four children and, now, football's increased demands, he and his wife, Liane, have had one summer vacation in 34 years. To the famed tropical hotspot of Muscatine, Iowa.
"I went nowhere," Curry said, but that's not true because he hit three different suburbs to play with his grandkids. That ain't nowhere.
Home or away, summer inevitably leads back to family. Sometimes it's rough. It's hard to game-plan getting multiple children to separate ballparks for different events with simultaneous starts.
Football conditioning at 7 a.m.?
"It's not as bad as it sounds," said Kaneland's Fedderly, father of three athletes ages 8 through 12. "Now, driving the kids to all their stuff, that's as bad as it sounds."
We in his boat recognize that, beneath the sarcasm, he wouldn't have it different.
Batavia's Gaspari said, "I've just learned over the years in coaching so many other people's kids, too, the time goes so quickly. I think a lot of times we don't sit back and cherish the time we have.
"We're all going in a million different directions and sometimes we fail to just try to enjoy just sitting and watching. It goes so fast, if you're not careful you blink again and it's over and you've missed it all. And that's time that you don't get back."