Press Box Perspective
Earl Vaughan Jr. Social Media Coordinator on X: @EarlVaughanJr
When I was a kid living in a single-wide mobile home with mom and dad, one of my favorite ways to entertain myself in that compact space was my record player. If you never heard of one, Google it ... they’ve got pictures. Anyway, it was how kids of my generation listened to music ... on something called record albums. My parents gave me a record narrated by Walt Disney legend Sterling Holloway. Holloway, a Georgia native, had a distinctive voice that was great for storytelling. This album contained a collection of Aesop’s fables, and my favorite on the album was one called the Fox and the Grapes. The story goes that a fox saw a juicy bunch of grapes hanging from a branch, but the branch was some distance off the ground. The fox made multiple futile attempts to leap for the grapes, but each one failed. He finally mustered all the energy he could, leapt high, missed again, and came crashing to the ground. In a moment of disgust, he dusted himself off and muttered, “Oh well, they’re probably sour.’’ Aesop’s moral for that tale? Any fool can despise what he cannot get. Which brings me to my topic for this installment: Complaining. One thing troubled me more than anything else in the nearly 40 years I covered high school sports at a daily newspaper. The complainers. Both coaches and readers alike. There were always a handful who couldn’t be satisfied, no matter what I was assigned to cover or how I wrote about it. The interesting thing I always noticed was that they only offered gripes, with no specifics on how I could improve if indeed there was something I had done wrong.
Usually it was just a difference of my opinion and theirs, which of course I could do nothing about unless I decided to agree with them. I didn’t ask that they change their minds, just that they tried to appreciate my perspective as I tried to appreciate theirs. I’ve written on this topic before, but I think a lot of the problem between all media and coaches is we don’t understand the inner workings of what the other does. That was why I tried to spend as much time as possible with coaches in their own environment. At the gym. On the practice field. In the coach’s office. Talking, listening, understanding the headaches of buying equipment, cutting players from a team, arguing with administrators who were clueless about the importance of high school sports. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy for them to experience my world. You couldn’t exactly invite a coach to sit in the front seat of my car on a Friday night while I banged out a story on deadline on a laptop computer. Or have them sit in my office at the crack of dawn, writing headlines for stories and editing the writing of my co-workers. So I’d educate them as best I could on how the job worked, knowing things would fall through the cracks and that I’d get complaints no matter what. Still, I avoided calling the grapes sour. And all I ask in return is that the coaches try to avoid doing the same. I sought to somehow, some way, get on the same page of respecting each other, knowing the limits of what we’re both capable of, and realizing one common goal: Whatever we do, it’s for the good of the young men and women we both serve.
See “Press Box Perspective” on page 13
NC Coach • Spring 2026 • Page 11 • nccoach.org
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker