The New Coach

Once again our school has maintained its record of being the quickest in the state to fire the coach after early season results didn’t go our way. Two ties and a single goal victory over a public school is not what we expect here at Vicarious High, and the writing was on the wall for the poor hapless fool when he subbed my kid out with six minutes still to play in the season opener. It’s never nice for someone to lose his job and I could see that our Athletic Director was troubled by the matter when he left my place the other night to head home to his wife and kids.

The new coach was announced in a press release on Thursday and like any responsible parent I did a little research on him. For some reason they went with a guy who has a soccer background rather than a teacher at the school so we can’t put quite as much employment pressure on him. It took me a little bit of time to find him on the net because he seems to have avoided the usual MySpace or Facebook sites but a bit of perseverance finds him on the professionals LinkedIn network. I had to masquerade as a potential customer of his sheet metal stamping business (whatever that is!) in order to get his details but it’s all good. Nice pictures of an attractive looking wife and two kids so he should be keen to avoid any of the scandals that have dogged our program in recent times.

I added his email address to my daughter’s AIM Instant Messenger buddy list so that she can chat to him about tactical play from the computer she has in her bedroom, and we sent him a nice little introduction including some pictures of myself and my daughter on the beach in St. Tropez last summer. I’m sure he’ll be delighted to know that we are ‘tech heads’ when he receives the texts and pictures we sent to his cell phone.

For his first training session yesterday I helped my daughter pick out a nice little inappropriate top which is not great for soccer but will let him know that she is a girl with a nice sunny disposition. Just between us I’ll confess that I was deliberately fifteen minutes late in picking her up from practice so that she could get to know him a little bit better. When I finally rolled into the parking lot with just the two of them left I could see they were getting on like a house on fire. I think this guy could be the real deal and I’m so glad we’ve gotten rid of his predecessor who really was a bit of a stalker.