To the Editor:Coaching is more than winning and losing. Coaching is more than teaching skills and strategy. Coaching is building character, attitude, sportsmanship and life skills. The poem "A Coach Never Loses" exemplifies the coaching of Mary Jo Graphenteen. Her dedication and energies given to Cardinal volleyball are within the lines of this selection. A Coach Never LosesA team can lose. Any team can lose. But in a sense, a very real sense, a coach never loses. For the job of a coach is over and finished once the starting whistle blows. She knows she’s won or lost before play starts. For a coach has two tasks. The minor one is to teach skills: how to serve consistently, pass and set accurately and to spike powerfully. The second task, the major task is to make women out of girls. It’s to teach an attitude of mind.It’s to implant character and not simply to impart skills. It’s to teach girls to play fair. This goes without saying. It’s to teach them to be humble in victory and proud in defeat. This goes without saying. But more important it’s to teach them to live up to their potential no matter what their potential is. It’s to teach them to do their best and never be satisfied with what they are but to strive and to be as good as they can be if they tried a little harder. A coach can never make a great player out of a girl who isn’t potentially great. But she can make a great competitor out of any child. And miraculously she can make a woman out of a girl. For the coach, the final score doesn’t read so many points for my team and so many points for theirs.Instead it reads: So many women out of so many girls. And this is the score that is never published. And this is the score that she reads to herself and which she finds her real joy when the last game is over.Jeanne BowronKari LaisSusan NelsonMark LundgrenTodd OyeJohnna AhrendtJason PhelpsEmily CrabtreeMichael WennigerKatie HemmeJessica Bowron OyeDan AmbornSteve KollmannLucinda Rofshus
