SACCO: A scary turn for prep sports

With one wave of his scepter, Fort Defiance Principal-turned-King Larry Landes gave legitimacy to the one thing high school sports does not need — mouth-breathing fans.

We should all be scared.

This columnist’s e-mail trough has been filled the last few days.

Filled with scared e-mails from young coaches in the area who are now left wondering if they don’t win, will they soon be out of jobs?

Filled with parents who are now wondering, that if their son or daughter doesn’t play enough, can they too get a longtime coach fired if they throw a Fort-sized temper tantrum?

We wish we could have been at that meeting Sunday night when close to 20 parents met with Landes regarding the football program.

We wish we could have heard how many spoke out against Dale Spitzer, the latest casualty in Landes’ mine-not-yours firing spree of coaches at Fort Defiance High School.

We wish we could know who it was. Which so-called parent, free of the hiding-behind-an-alias chains that comment boards and Web sites freely allow, had the sand to speak out against a quarter of a century of coaching.

(Remember the good old days of newspapers, by the way? When, if you wanted to decry someone for something, you had to write a letter to the editor with your real name on it. Remember those days when newspapers would reject anything close to libelous and not run it? It wasn’t too long ago, folks.)

Monday officially marks a sad day in sports in Augusta County for one high school. The day when either complaining parents or, scarier still, a rough season or two, can now cost a high school coach his or her job.

There’s no good to be felt with Landes sending Spitzer out the door. Only a feeling that the parents have won because their Little Johnny Snowflake isn’t playing enough. Or their little Suzy Sunshine isn’t getting her at-bats.

Only the feeling that the last bastion of true, pure sports in this county was taken away.

Folks, the coaches are right, the wins and losses don’t matter. They never should.

What matters, when you look ahead four years from now, is whether or not those boys and girls are contributing members of society. If they are, that’s worth more touchdowns, sacks and home runs than the greatest of high school athletes could accumulate in six careers, let alone just four years. Everything after that is bonus.

When did high school sports get taken away from the kids? The kids who wanted to know why Terry Waters? The 14-year wrestling coach Landes unceremoniously dumped back in June. (The first appearance of the “No comment” bug Fort has begun to love hiding behind.)

On Monday, according to more e-mails and phone calls than I can recall, close to 40 football players wanted Spitzer to be their coach next season and told Landes as much.

The kids, man. The freaking kids wanted him back and, once again, were spat on by so-called adults.

A few of them could probably blame their parents.

Maybe what parents don’t know is that guys like Spitzer take care of the field on their own time. Or get up early to open the weight room on their own time. Or, like Spitzer did, have Sunday meetings with the players so they could learn how to represent their school on and off the field.

These things are more important than winning. Are they not? Someone says, “Coach Spitzer changed my life,” as a few e-mailers did, and doesn’t that make a state championship feel like a peanut-butter sandwich the night after dining on steak?

It should.

There are a few parents at Fort Defiance who can no longer tell their kids to start acting like adults when they get in trouble, without those kids having every right to turn and laugh in their faces.

There are a few coaches all over the county who have every right to be afraid after this dangerous precedent set by King Larry and his Augusta County School Board cronies.

And there are fewer still in this whole episode at this high school-turned-coaching-mausoleum who can look in the mirror and smile at a job well done.

One of them is Dale Spitzer.

Not so fast, King Larry, you might not like what you see. Right now, there are a few athletes at your high school who can vouch for that.