My old softball coaches were recently invited back to the high school’s new field for a ceremony marking the 20th anniversary of the first team they led to the state championship. (They’d coached seven others downstate before, but 2005 was the first win).
Women in their mid- to late-30s lined up on the field with kids on their hips and at their sides. Mr. Kolbusz and my dad, both in their 70s and not keen for attention, followed, each accepting a long-stemmed rose and awkward hugs from the women whose names they mostly remembered.
Standing in the bleachers beside my daughter and son, I was unexpectedly emotional. Attention was on the women, rightfully. But my thoughts were on my dad and coach Kolbusz.
Kolbusz calls my dad his co-head coach, and that’s how they operated. He hit grounders and ran situations with infielders. My dad hit fly balls and practiced cutoffs with outfielders. Kolbusz called pitches from his perch on a bucket of balls in the doorway of the dugout. My dad practiced footwork and blocks with catchers. Kolbusz worked the room. My dad hid in the back of it.
Even with full-time jobs and four kids apiece, they showed up every day, never calling in sick or taking a mental-health day. They expected the same from their players: that those of us offered a spot on the team would show up every day and play our hardest. When I couldn’t catch popups that dropped behind first base, Kolbusz stayed late to practice with me. My dad took me to the batting cages in the high school basement on weekends to get extra cuts in.
They coached and treated us like athletes, not like girls. This is exactly what many of us needed and wanted, on and off the field.
Last summer when I saw that the athletic wing of the high school had been demolished, I remembered how during tryouts, decades earlier, I’d sprinted down a dimly lit second-floor hallway in that building toward Kolbusz with his stopwatch. I remembered fielding ground balls off the basketball court in the south gym, the crack of the ball against the wooden floor, the brush of my glove against it — and I remembered lingering after practice one May afternoon in the classroom where we stored our gear, listening with Kolbusz and my dad as Chicago Cubs pitcher Kerry Wood clinched his 20-strikeout game — a feat achieved at that time by only one other MLB pitcher.
What was special and memorable wasn’t just what Wood accomplished that day, but also that when it happened, I was with two coaches I respected and admired, who loved sports, who loved coaching, who’d given me a shot to play varsity softball two years running, and who above all knew — through and through — what they were doing.
That classroom, and the building it was in, are gone now. The south gym and hallway above it, all gone. Both coaches have retired after decades of working together.
I don’t coach softball. I don’t play anymore. But I carry with me every day what I learned from Mr. Kolbusz and my dad about how to coach, how to play, how to deal with defeat and victory, how to strive for excellence — even when you may not be the tallest, fastest, most athletic or talented person in the room.
You have to show up every day, do your job, and consistently put in the effort. You have to shut up and listen to people who know more than you, do what they tell you to do, and absorb every possible learning they offer.
You have to figure out what you care about, what you want to do and can do, who you want to be. And then you have to do it, over and over again, even when tired, sad, even when you’d rather not. For as long as you possibly can.
Win, lose, the outcome is what it always is: The season ends. Mine. Theirs. Kerry Wood’s. New coaches take the helm. New pitchers take the mound. New girls run on and off a new field, and soon there will be a new building to practice in during the winter and store gear in each spring.
I cried that day, watching my dad accept a rose and listening to Kolbusz describe the turning points of that 2005 state final, because I know now what a privilege it was to play for them. What they did and how they did it was on a different scale than Kerry Wood’s 20K game. But it was greatness, nonetheless, delivered from a couple of unlikely sources — two gruff but dedicated 5-foot-something, inner-city public-school gym teachers, one Polish, one Italian. And it continues to resonate in the lives of hundreds of women they coached — or at a minimum, in mine.