It’s easy to get blinded by the Friday night lights. People often get lost in the stats sheet, the rushing yards, tackles, receptions and PATs. Football — high school football — is so much more than that. Especially when you’re a coach.
“(The coaches), they’re constantly working,” Bethany Parker, wife of Holtville offensive coordinator and basketball coach Greg Parker, said. “Friday nights, they don’t get home sometimes until the wee hours of the morning because they’re doing laundry, they’ve got weekend meetings. We always say, ‘We’ll see you in December,’ just because (coaching) is so involved.”
There are precious few weeks left in the summer before football season takes over and becomes the center of the universe. The coaching staff at Holtville, led by second-year coach Cory Lee, is continuing a tradition of gathering coaches and their families in a sun-soaked weekend retreat on the lake.
“We do this little family outing every year,” Parker said. “The coaches will have their time when they all bond and, of course, they’ll talk football. (Coach Lee), since he’s been here, has been really focused on team bonding in terms of the families.”
A football team is a family navigating the ups and downs of life, but not in the privacy of their home. They don their pads and helmets, whistles and baseball caps and they step out onto one of the biggest stages in any tight-knit southern community: the football field. The coaches, regardless of whether they are staff or volunteer, donate their afternoons to practices, sacrifice weekends to meetings and settle into the trenches of what it takes to win a football game.
“The fact that (Lee) has made such a big push to bring us all together is awesome,” Parker said. “We try to get together throughout the season and take treats to the players, so we’ll actually show up on the field, several of the moms and girlfriends, and pass out popsicles.”
The families behind the coaches are often overlooked, in spite of the sacrifices they make to ensure their spouses can invest in the young athletes of the community. For every football coach that spends his weekend agonizing over Friday’s game, watching film, revising the playbook, there is a spouse at home who tucks the kids into bed and lends a sympathetic ear.
“You can’t really have a successful football program without the support of the family,” Parker said. “What I love about what (Lee) has done at Holtville is he has made such an effort to make sure that everyone knows how appreciated they are and how we couldn’t do it without each other.”
There’s an old saying that says “it takes a village.” At Holtville, it takes more than a village, more than a community. It takes a family.
