"Everybody thinks the Gators are going to kill us next week," he adds. "One hundred to nothing. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that. But I don't believe it."
He asks what worries them. After an embarrassed silence, the complaints start rolling in, slowly at first, then in a rush. The offensive line stinks. So does pass coverage. The plays Mahoney calls are too razzle-dazzle. The coach nods after each comment.
Mike Gorman
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"What's happening here is like snowboarding," he says. "How many people here did face-plants when they were learning to snowboard?" Most of the boys raise their hands.
"If you're not raising your hands, you're lying," Keenan says. The rest of the hands go up.
"Suddenly, if you keep at it, the face-plants stop," Mahoney continues. "Suddenly, you're not face-planting anymore. You're up on the rail in the half-pipe. All we're doing here, guys, is face-plants."
Before the team starts its regular Monday "fix-it day" practice, Mahoney lays out his vision for the 2003 Cougars. "Some of you played two years ago, and you were world beaters," he says. "Well, those days are over. It's too competitive out there. Don't buy into all the crap that's going around. You can be 6-4 and win a championship. You don't have to be 11-0. Our goal is to be .500 by mid-season. So if we're 0-2, don't lose the faith. By the time mid-season comes around, that's when we'll be hitting our stride.
"Am I a fool?" Mahoney asks as the kids begin standing. "Yes. I took this job. So am I a fool? That's what your parents are saying."
But, he concludes, "I believe in you guys. Let's go."
In the parking lot, the mood is less optimistic. "Saturday is going to be a disaster," predicts one parent.
Practice starts under a sky threatening rain.
If Monday was bad, Tuesday is apocalyptic. Roche's departure sprang a leak that's become a flood. Within 24 hours, fourteen players -- including the entire first team -- have quit. Mahoney receives a voice message from someone he doesn't know instructing him that the film-study session has been canceled.
At an emergency board meeting that evening, league administrators realize they must make a choice: Either the Evergreen Cougars dissolve, or Mahoney disappears.
Their decision is revealed the next day. On Wednesday afternoon, Mahoney gets a call from a league administrator who tells him the procedure for returning his equipment. The caller is embarrassed to discover that Mahoney doesn't know what he's talking about.
Mahoney says no one from the team contacted him to officially deliver the bad news. But the now-former coach pieces together what happened. "They just freaked out and shot me in the back," he says. "I have coached thousands of kids over twenty years, and never have I dealt with such an ugly bunch in my life.
"Everybody has their ups and downs. These people just can't deal with the downs. When you put together a team and win thirty games in a row, you create monsters. I'm building these kids up at practice, and their parents are tearing them down at dinner."
Over the past six months, Mahoney says, he's put in between a dozen and thirty hours a week preparing to coach the thirteen-year-old boys from Evergreen -- only to have the team yanked away from him in secret. "There's nothing anybody can say to me -- an apology or an explanation -- that I will accept," he fumes.
Rebecca Schloegl, the team mom and league president, regrets what's happened. Mahoney simply lost the confidence of too many parents to stay on the job, she says. With the team so obviously vulnerable, parents had begun to worry about their children's welfare. "The Cougars' opponents scored an average of 5.5 points on them over the last three years," she says. "Now these people are wanting to put a hundred points on the board against this team. They won't stop."
She adds that to many parents, the season looked lost before it started. The consensus was that Mahoney had never spent enough time teaching the players fundamental skills such as blocking and tackling. "All he's done is half-speed walking drills," Schloegl says.
On Wednesday night, while a practice is hastily thrown together, parents meet at a nearby rec center. The meeting is bitter, and Division II parents accuse Division I parents of orchestrating a coup. Still, by the end they've reached an uneasy truce, and they agree to give a new coach a chance. "We're hanging by a thread," Schloegl says. "I don't know if we can keep it together."
The following day, the team's Web site notes some changes. Saturday's game against the Gators has been postponed until September 17, it advises. The first game, against Highlands Ranch, is now scheduled for September 6.
Mahoney's name is gone from the site. After the title of head coach is the name of James Clark, who, as coach of the Evergreen Cougars' team of ten-year-olds, has compiled a 27-3 record over the past three years.
"Team unity is expected of all players and coaches," the site concludes.
