Meddling parents are a coach’s worst nightmare.
At best, they make life difficult; at worst, they can get a coach fired. So imagine what might happen if a parent is the boss too.
Thanks to Streator Township High School District 40 Supt. Bill Mattingly, we don’t have to imagine.
On Feb. 2, he pulled African-American point guard Wes Hood out of class for a brief, private meeting in his office. According to Hood, Mattingly said he should pass the ball more to the “white kids on the team,” specifically mentioning his son, Micah, and another player.
Hood said that when he replied that he got the ball to whichever player was open, Mattingly said he must be “blind” not to see that wasn’t true.
Hood, a senior, told basketball coach Ken Bublitz about the meeting. Bublitz, showing guts as well as good sense, wrote a Feb. 4 memo in which he strongly criticized Mattingly for the alleged racial reference and for undermining the coach’s authority by discussing a basketball issue with Hood without his knowledge.
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That in turn has prompted a school board investigation and a groundswell of media attention in the predominantly white north-central Illinois town of about 14,000.
The good news in this mess is that Hood seems largely unfazed by the meeting and its aftermath, though he did check a few game tapes to make sure he had been hitting the open man. He also reports that team chemistry, including his relationship with Micah Mattingly, seems fine.
“I don’t think it was right, what he did, obviously,” Hood said about the superintendent Thursday, “but I’m not hanging my head. I try not to think about it. I just worry about basketball.”
At a school board meeting Tuesday, Mattingly apologized for his discussion with Hood. He was out of town and unavailable to comment Friday.
In a Tribune story Tuesday, Mattingly expressed regret for violating the school’s chain of command. He declined to discuss his meeting with Hood in detail but said it included the guard’s decisions on the court.
Mattingly denied his comments were racist, and Adrena Moton-Phillips, the mother of two African-American Streator basketball players, praised him for his treatment of her sons as their youth football coach and as a mentor.
“He used a wrong choice of words, but people are trying to make it seem like a racial thing, and it’s not,” she said.
Mattingly, though, apparently injected race into this issue, which is still inexcusable. What’s more, although Hood said Mattingly did not raise his voice or make threats, the superintendent abused his authority by letting his role as a parent affect his conduct as an administrator.
Fortunately, many school officials don’t blur the lines between their roles as parents and bosses, but some do.
York coach Tom Shields said he faced two attempts to fire him as coach during his eight seasons at Pontiac. Both attempts, he said, included a school board member whose son had been cut from the team. The second attempt also included a board member unhappy about a son’s playing time.
Shields survived two board votes largely, he said, because of school administrators’ support. That, he said, is essential in a profession of one-year contracts.
“I would have been out in Year 2 without support from the administration,” said Shields, who resigned at Pontiac in 2002.
Meddling from parent-bosses takes place in schools of all sizes, but Shields believes it’s more frequent in small towns “because the spotlight is more on athletics.”
Johnsburg coach Ed Sennett has avoided this problem but has talked to coaches who haven’t. Some said they felt pressure coaching a superintendent’s or principal’s son even though the boss never said a word about it.
“You just don’t want to screw up with this guy’s kid because it could mean your job,” Sennett said.
Hood’s mother, Cindy Kettman, has emerged from her son’s experience believing a superintendent’s child should attend school in another district in the first place.
“I think you would favor your own kid,” she said.
Shields advised coaches who do inherit a boss’ child to try to ignore it.
“If you worry about that, it’s going to show and affect your coaching and destroy your team,” he said. “As a coach, you coach until someone tells you that you no longer work there.”
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