13— Parents
They’re the parents of basketball playing daughters. Though distanced as they were, one couple from the other, by the years and their separate lives…still, they had much in common. Not the least of which were their expectations about what their girls, members of the Trinity High School Lady Shamrock basketball team, should take from competing under the tutelage of one Harry DeFrank.
Who are they, these mothers and fathers? Well, there’s Lorie and Mark Walker, parents of Amy (Class of ’93) and Chrissy (Class of ’99)…there’s Sue and Mark Glessner, parents of Jena (Class of ‘96) and Jill (Class of ’03)...and there’s John and Kelly Murray, parents of Katelyn (Class of ’05), Kristen (Class of ’07) and Laura (Class of 2010)…
The Walkers, Glessners and Murrays…not surprisingly, perhaps…shared (a) connection beyond the athletic skills of their children and their family decisions to enroll their children in Trinity. Each couple, in its own fashion, was involved in competitive athletics in high school and college. Each knew what sport was all about. More importantly, each knew what their children could expect to experience in the years ahead as they developed into talented players themselves.
It was the winter of 2005-06 that the Walkers, the Glessners and the Murrays were asked to sit down to reflect on Harry DeFrank, his Trinity basketball program, and the influence they hoped it would have on their daughters’ futures. The conversations, though at separate times and in separate settings, once again quickly took on a common chord…something you found often when you asked others about Harry DeFrank.
The overriding question was put simply to each couple. What do you, as parents who competed yourselves, look for and expect from in a coach? And, by extension, what should your children take from their high school playing careers?
Kelly and John Murray spoke in their suburban Harrisburg home one workweek evening in January. “We want our children to be coachable,” Kelly Murray, seated on the family sofa with her husband, said. “No matter who the coach is, they need to respect the coach. And we wanted a coach who showed he or she respected the players…”
Mark and Lorie Walker came at the question from a slightly different perspective as they responded in a conversation which took place in the conference room of the family’s Mechanicsburg real estate office one blustery January afternoon. “We’ve been very fortunate that we had two men there (DeFrank and boy’s basketball coach, Larry Kostelac) who were very good at coaching and very good with the kids…very good at teaching them in basics, not just in basketball but in life. That’s what we were looking for…for our children to learn some of those life lessons.”
Mark Glessner expressed it in pretty much the same terms. “You always try to look for somebody who’s going to teach your child from a technical perspective,” he explained. “But at some point, you don’t always have the ability to pick who the coach is…We were so lucky and so happy to have Harry DeFrank at Trinity. But the kids were going to Trinity and that wasn’t going to change…”
…It’s not easy for a parent to have a daughter play for Harry DeFrank. With him, it’s been a given through the years. He’s very demanding and he can be…well, stern might be just a bit of an understatement when it comes to players who aren’t meeting his performance standards in practice or in games. Phil Gillis knows. Gillis had one daughter (Katie) play varsity for DeFrank and a second (Sarah) play with the JV squad. At the time of this meeting in the summer of 2005, he had served for five years as an assistant to DeFrank with the Lady Shamrocks. When his daughters were of playing age, however, he, wisely, sat as a parent in the stands.
There were times, Gillis remembered, when Katie would come home “in tears” because she was upset with her play or lack of playing time. “My advice to her was, you either go in and talk to him or force his hand (by her performance) to put you on the court, force him to play you.” She did, working hard enough and performing well enough to earn varsity letters in her junior and senior years and continue her playing career at Susquehanna University.
Mothers being mothers, it wasn’t surprising that one of the strongest recollections Sue Glessner and Lorie Walker have of Harry DeFrank had nothing to do with their daughters’ successes on the court. Rather, it had to do with how, through the years, he handled kids who weren’t quite as talented as the many standouts who played for him.
For Sue Glessner, it was very personal. Daughter Jena was both a volleyball and basketball player at Trinity. In the fall of her junior year, she injured her knee playing volleyball. The injury limited her ability to compete when basketball tryouts were held a few months later. “She comes home crying,” Sue remembers. “She couldn’t run…she wasn’t going to be able to play.”
This is where DeFrank’s personal approach to his kids registered with Sue Glessner. “He says to her: ‘Jena, you go home, get well. There will be a position for you…a spot…when you return for your senior year.’ So she rehabbed for her senior year. Now, Jena wasn’t Jill. She would be coming back as the 8th, 9th or 10th player. So when her senior year came, she says to me: ‘Mom, it takes so much time.’ I said to her, ‘Well, you go to coach and you tell him because he saved you a spot. I said, I think what you should do for him is be a manager. And she was. But he had saved a spot on that team.’ I thought that was a really nice thing for coach to do. He was being loyal to Jenna, a former player.”
Lorie Walker has a similar take on DeFrank’s coaching style and techniques. “One thing that really sticks out in my mind is his fairness,” she told her visitor. “I think he is very fair.” She recalled Chrissy’s sophomore year. A couple of upper class players were talented enough to make the team, but not as talented as some of the younger players coming up through the grades. “Harry was very true to them (the upper class girls),” she remembered. “He made them captains for that year. They had a leadership role and they were tremendous. He made them feel special. Everybody was treated fairly…he really tried to find the niche that each girl would fit into in helping the team and helping themselves.”
Unfortunately…by all accounts, the pressure some high school players—and by extension, their parents—feel to succeed in today’s sports climate seems to be growing rather than diminishing.
What’s more, the potential tension zone between parent and coach seems to be getting much larger. Frank Cackovic was another who certainly saw it. That’s not surprising since he had been involved in high school sports as a player, a coach and an administrator--not to mention a fan—for more than a half-century.
“Some of the stresses that are coming from the present day demands of athletics are draining parents and players today,” he says. “The challenge of the competition of athletics…young kids, 9 and 10 years old that have to go to these camps… If they stay with it, the demands are incredible both financially and on their time…”
Why was that, he was asked? “Because of what the goal is, the college scholarship,” he responds. “But pray God,” he quickly laments “that it comes around…”
Parental incidents, it seems, just go with the territory. They’ve troubled coaches in the past; they trouble coaches today; and, as contemporary high school athletics get increasingly competitive, they will continue to trouble them in the future. The challenge to a coach is how he or she handles the disgruntled parent. DeFrank, for one, seems to treat it as an occupational hazard. He deals with it, if he can; dismisses it if he can’t, and moves on. For that, he has strong support.
“That’s one of the things I give Coach DeFrank credit for,” said Phil Gillis, now wearing his coaching hat. Gillis played for DeFrank in grade school at a time when “parental influence” on the game or the team was minimal at best. Still, Gillis said of DeFrank throughout his coaching career: “He doesn’t really worry about who’s happy with him and who’s unhappy with him. There never has been with the man, which is something I admire, especially in today’s climate.”
Mark Walker was quick to take the same line when the question was posed to him. “He’s fair to his players,” he said, but he’s also “fair to the program.” Walker put it this way: “He has an amazing knack for spotting the kids who could really do well. And he gets ’em into it early in the season. He never allowed parents to be in charge of the program. That’s really being honest with the program and being loyal to the program, and that’s tough to do.”
Agreed, says John Murray. “It’s too easy for many parents to get involved today,” he believes. “If something doesn’t go the kid’s way, well, you know, it must be the coach’s fault. Coach DeFrank has always been tremendous that way…he’s not going to be swayed one way or the other…”
So what do these parents see that their daughters have taken from this association with Harry DeFrank, who can be very much “in-their-face?”—more so, parent and player alike will tell you, most frequently with his most talented players?
Says John Murray: “Kate, coming in her freshman year, that was very intimidating for her at first…the academics, then the basketball. And we watched her emerge as a leader, and I think a lot of people see that, her leadership ability. I credit Trinity a lot for that. And I can see it with Kristen in her confidence level…the basketball, the academic environment, the atmosphere with the faculty…I respect Harry. I know when he gets in somebody’s face, it’s to make them better. It’s going to happen and, hopefully, the girls get stronger from it.”
Phil Gillis saw that in his daughter Katie’s growth under DeFrank’s coaching
for two varsity seasons: “She became a tougher kid for the experience,” he
recalled. “Things that bothered her early on didn’t bother her later because she
knew what she needed to do to become successful. The experience got her ready
to play at Susquehanna and go on with her life. I see that with kids who played
for him. I just see them learning and maturing and becoming not only better
players, but better kids on and off the court…”
And the Walkers? They responded this way: “Our girls learned how to handle
pressure and stress because it is stressful to play in such a successful
program,” Lorie observed. “They learned how to handle that. And in the
process, they learned how to express themselves with adults and in interviews.
I thought all of our children had a good work ethic because they had to. You
didn’t have time to just play around. Your time was very focused and
organized. You had basketball, you had practice, you had your schoolwork.”
For Mark, it was a matter of “self-esteem,” something, he said, “all kids need to find… If the kids can find something that they do well, then they take that to the next level and do all types of good things. I think that’s what translated (for his daughters under DeFrank). When they did well on the court, and they developed that self-esteem, they took that right to the classroom. It really did work hand-in-hand.”
Which, for the Glessners, took the conversation right back to DeFrank and the influence…the positive influence…he exerts on his players. “He’s very humble, very unassuming,” said Sue Glessner. “It’s all about the kids, never about himself. The times he got coach of the year, anytime you would talk to him about a game, he would take it back to the kids and what they did. And kids can learn from that. He influences you without you knowing it. Jill played on a championship team when she was just 16. It’s only now (at the time, her junior year in college) that she fully realizes just how hard that was and how lucky she was to have had that opportunity.”
John Murray struck a similar note in concluding these separate conversations with the parents. “I go back to the teacher that you had in school…the teacher who didn’t cut you any slack. Typically, after you graduate, you look back and you say, ‘I learned more from that teacher than I learned from anybody else.’ I think our girls are going to look back after they graduate and they’ll say the same thing about coach. They’re going to say, ‘Gee, now I realize what he was trying to teach us…’”
Copyright (c) 2008 VPC, L.L.C.