When the Jamesville-DeWitt boys basketball team made their way to the locker room at SRC Arena early on the evening of March 8, it certainly felt disappointment at tasting defeat in the Section III Class A title game for the second year in a row.
A few days later, that disappointment disappeared, replaced by shock, anger and disbelief.
Bob McKenney, the coach in the red suspenders, who had guided the Red Rams to five state titles, four of them in a row, was reportedly given an ultimatum by J-D’s powers-that-be: resign, or get removed.
The resulting firestorm was both predictable and preventable. Almost to a man, McKenney’s former players, famous and otherwise, spoke out in support of him. More than 1,700 signed a petition asking for his reinstatement.
Then, for 90 minutes at last Monday’s J-D School Board meeting (attended by more than 200 at the high school auditorium), that support was given public voice. Everyone from players to parents spoke on McKenney’s behalf. But no decision was rendered.
It didn’t matter – by Monday, McKenney was out.
All of this has raised, again, painful questions that haunt high school sports both here and everywhere – who’s in charge? And who should be?
Once, it wasn’t so difficult to answer. Coaches ran teams, and their word was generally accepted, both by the kids they coached, and by parents, too. True, athletic directors could change coaches at any time, but unless their behavior really got out of line, it tended not to happen.
Somewhere, that dynamic started to change. Once parents discovered that they could, if they wanted, bypass the AD and offer their concerns directly to the school board if they didn’t like the way things were going, the power of coaches started to erode.
And it didn’t take long for local examples of this power shift to emerge. At Marcellus, some parents didn’t like the way Pete Birmingham, who coached the Mustangs to a sectional Class B title, handled his lineup, so they went to the school board, and voila, Birmingham was out – in the middle of the season, no less.
More famous was how a parent’s complaint about her daughter’s treatment at Cicero-North Syracuse led to the dismissal of Kerry Bennett, who coached the Northstars to four state Class AA championships. Once again, accomplishments meant nothing.
So it is here, again, with Bob McKenney. Ostensibly, the whole thing got triggered by a practice altercation (verbal, not physical), that led a group of parents to demand the suspension of senior Dom DeRegis for the sectional final against CBA – and J-D did suspend DeRegis.
What followed, with players putting the number 5 DeRegis wore on their warm-up T-shirts and socks, may have been interpreted, by some, as both support for their teammate and a protest to what the district had done to him, and that McKenney allowed it to happen. Or at least that’s the theory.
That’s just one of many theories that have floated around the last couple of weeks, which will happen when school boards do not discuss their personnel decisions in public. When facts are absent, people fill in their own reality.
From this standpoint, it’s not my place to offer full praise or criticism for McKenney. Just as there are plenty who praise the way he has shaped their lives both on and off the court, there are, too, a fair share of critics who will point out what he’s done wrong. Spend any length of time in one place, as McKenney has at J-D, and there’s bound to be flowers and laurels, slings and arrows.
At the very least, though, all sides are entitled to the facts. Yes, the fate of a single basketball coach is not as important as other matters to a school board, but with all the attention this has drawn, it’s important that people get at least some idea of why J-D wanted McKenney out. Absent that, they will latch on to any theory, and the more spectacular, the better.
What is not in dispute is the shock in which these events have registered. How could the coach of Andy Rautins and Brandon Triche, Dajuan Coleman and Tyler Cavanaugh, get driven out, especially with the J-D program still in a healthy, competitive state?
In the smaller picture, Bob McKenney will be fine. His awesome record of achievement is in the books and cannot be touched, and if another school wants him to coach, he’s likely to get that chance.
But looking at it from a larger perspective, what happened to McKenney could deliver a chilling message to any coach out there, that even stories of success and accomplishment can have dark endings due to the agendas of a few, whether justified or not.
