It looks like I wrote last week’s column one coach too soon.
I’ve been informed that Coronado High School girls basketball coach Kamau Turner has been fired. That’s another successful coach gone.
Turner turned around a struggling girls basketball program and made them winners. During his three-year tenure, the Lady Leopards won District 2AA titles in 2007 and 2008. The year before he arrived, they had been 5-22.
Coronado was district runner-up this past season, but that was because the powerhouse Navajo Prep joined the district. Prep just happens to be the Class AA state champion.
Turner also turned around the Leopards’ volleyball program. In his first two years at the school, he took a program that had won just one game in 2006 to a district runner-up spot in 2007 and the district title in 2008.
When I would talk to Coronado athletes, they would always sound very supportive of coach Turner — after all, he had made them winners.
Obviously, it took something other than a winning program or the support of the players to please someone in the Jemez Mountain School District.
By the way, to make things clear, McCurdy football coach Eric Vigil is not going to Dulce. He will be the football coach with the longest tenure at a single school (McCurdy, that is) now that Ron Graham has decided not to return to Dulce.
Last week I said that politics don’t belong in sports. That’s because, like oil and water, the two don’t mix well.
We value sports, or at least say we value sports, because of the lessons they teach. They teach that hard work pays off, that working together is the way to accomplish goals, that discipline makes you stronger and that it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. These are valuable lessons to learn and I agree that sports can be a way to learn them.
Some of the lessons politics seems to teach are: it doesn’t matter how qualified you are for a job, it’s who you know or what your last name is. It’s not a crime unless you get caught, and if you get caught, avoid punishment. It’s okay to be less than honest, and it’s okay to spread rumors and lies if it helps you win.
We use sports to try to set an example for our children of the type of person we want them to be. I’m hard put to find many lessons learned from politics that would help a child grow into the type of person I’d want them to be, or the person I’d want to be myself.