News Summary

The sad news arrived in an e-mail from a friend.

My coach had died.

Augie Bossu, longtime baseball and football coach at Cleveland's Benedictine High, was 91 and had remained an active coach until just a few years ago. He is a member of both the Ohio High School Baseball and Football Coaches Halls of Fame, and won nearly 1,000 games in the two sports.

The expected tributes started appearing in print and online. They were the kind we hear about great coaches — the records, the honors, the quotations from famous athletes.

This is a tribute that goes beyond the athletic field and into why coaches can be such important figures in our lives.

***

It started with the morning announcements on a winter day of my junior year in high school.

"Kevin Riley, please see Coach Bossu," the homeroom speaker squawked.

I froze, as all eyes in homeroom turned to me. Baseball tryouts had just started, and at an all-male Catholic high school, being asked to see the coach was an unusual — and possibly bad — sign.

By the late 1970s, "Coach" was already considered a legend in northeast Ohio, both in baseball and football. We all knew he had played football at Notre Dame where Elmer Layden, one of Notre Dame's famous "Four Horsemen," coached him.

I had a hard time imagining that this would be a good moment. In my last one-on-one meeting with him the season before, he had cut me from a baseball team that later reached the state finals.

He was an intimidating figure to a 17-year-old, but not because he was the stereotypical shouting, intimidating, sideline-prowling coach.

His influence came from being exactly the opposite. He attended Mass in the school chapel every day. He would call time-out during a baseball game and ask "Mr. Umpire" a question. He told us to never blame a referee for a loss.

The strongest curse I ever heard him use? "Hell's bells."

He motivated through high expectations. His players only feared disappointing him.

I gathered all my courage and headed to his office.

As was typical of him, he made no small talk. He told me he expected that I would be the starting catcher, which he considered a big job. Then he handed me a sheet of paper and one of his trademark stubby pencils. He asked me to write down, in order, my rating of the pitchers trying out for the team.

He made it clear our conversation was confidential, and I left. I spent the rest of the day dodging questions from my friends about the meeting.

The same announcement came the next week, and he had me rate the pitchers again. He did the same thing the next week, and for several more.

When final cuts were made, the pitching staff was made up of the players at the top of my list.

The message to me was powerful and unforgettable. Certainly the process of picking a team remains largely subjective, and I have no way of knowing if my judgments happened to be the same as his.

But I believed he had put the aspirations of my friends in my hands, in an environment where athletic competition was magnified. He had followed my recommendations exactly. He had given me power — and enormous responsibility.

It was one of my first, and most important, lessons in leadership.

He did the same thing the next season, and I remember making sure to rate accurately and fairly. And once again, he apparently followed my list exactly, and he taught me important lessons.

He gave me the opportunity to exercise judgment, make difficult decisions and to show honesty in a way that I never forgot. He let me experience how difficult such decisions are to make.

Great coaches teach great lessons. They become well-known for the on-the-field success of their teams. But they know that most of the people they coach will never become famous athletes. Instead their players assume important roles in society; they become teachers, journalists, lawyers, accountants, doctors, police officers, firefighters — and spouses and parents.

And the lessons they learned from their coach guide them in their decisions at work, in their communities and in their homes.

If we are lucky, we play for a coach like Augie Bossu somewhere along the way. And we are luckier still if their lessons remain with us.

Kevin Riley is the editor of the Dayton Daily News. Contact him at (937) 225-2161 or kriley@coxohio.com.