Coach ought to go quietly into obscurity (03/20/04)

Now here’s a bad idea.

Word comes out of Delaware County that former Muncie Central High School basketball coach Bill Harrell wants his old job back.

Trouble is, this is the same coach who resigned just a year ago amid a flurry of reports that he’d been paying some of his players little bonuses for their performance.

These weren’t enormous payments by all accounts, and they were more like “gifts” or “loans” some folks insist.

But, just the same, this was a coach who was monetarily rewarding athletes who were supposedly amateurs competing at the high school level.

For that boneheaded behavior, he rightly lost his job. But instead of retiring into obscurity or demonstrating that he realized how badly he had fouled up, the same guy now wants to get back into the ranks of coaching.

Now, we can be as cynical as the next guy in this 21st century sports nightmare of payoffs and performance enhancing drugs at the collegiate and professional levels. But we’d still like to think that there are some things that are so absolutely beyond the pale in high school athletics that to engage in them is enough to end a career, things like monetary rewards for players.

Apparently not, as far as this particular coach is concerned. He figures — because he has some state championships in his resume — that he deserves a fresh start.

We don’t think so.

But we have this nagging suspicion that the Delaware County booster mentality could prevail. To some folks, it all comes down to wins, no matter how tainted they may be. How sad is that? — J.R.[[In-content Ad]]