Varsity Kansas - The Blog

How about Southeast coach Carl Taylor hitting this milestone? What a truly amazing feat, considering the City League has long been thought of as the state’s top basketball league. It’s a league that frustrates many of its coaches, though, because the teams all tend to beat up on each other. No game is a guaranteed win. Yet Taylor has found unbelievable success year in and year out.

Taylor is a favorite of mine — although, I have to admit, there’s few coaches I don’t like. But he does scare me a bit. If you’ve ever seen him coach, you know this man has a fire in him that runs deep and strong. If you’ve ever seen him chew out one of his players — always deservedly so — you almost feel a twinge for the kid, glad that you’re not on the other end of it.
Well, after a Southeast loss, Taylor’s at his best quote-wise. When he wins, you get “That’s how we should play. We did what we are supposed to do.” But when the Buffaloes lose, oooh, he has no problem breaking down specifically what happened. Approaching him, though, isn’t the easiest, and I’ve been dealing with him for 12 seasons now and we have a solid relationship. But he’s still got that fire in his eyes and it’s tough to not feel a little bit concerned that you might bear the brunt of his anger.

Yet only once has Taylor gotten angry at me. One time after a loss at Northwest, I grabbed one of his players for an interview as he was walking out of the locker room. Taylor saw that and barked at me that I was never to talk to one of his players without talking to him. I was mortified because there were about 30 people standing there waiting for the players. I told him that, too. I said that he never had a problem with me grabbing a player when they won, so why did it change when they lost?

The next moment, with his response, solidified my respect for Taylor. He apologized. Now, if there’s any women reading this, you know men suck at apologies. And for all sports fans, we know coaches aren’t the most likely to admit they were wrong. But Taylor did.

So congrats Coach Taylor.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 10:51 a.m. and is filed under City League, Coaches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.