Let’s just hope those people don’t feign shock when the stone starts falling on them.At the very end of Netflix's Titletown High, viewers learn that scandal was afoot at Valdosta High, all surrounding Coach Rush Propst. When people start to take tools to harm it, others will be there to resolidify the stone. When your pedestal grows so high much like it did for Propst during his days at Hoover, it isn’t going to be knocked down in a few years no matter the amount of brutal things that have gone on under his watch. The coach will say all the right things in the interview and a long line of horrible history will be ignored by a group of people just wanting bragging rights over a kid’s game. What else could be the explanation for everything that has happened in his career and life over the past 20-plus years?īut this isn’t the end, is it? Of course it isn’t because our society, especially with high school football in the South, is so wired for Friday night victories, that another school will look at Propst and say, “Well, maybe he has changed.” It is like he has an addiction to cheating at all costs and not doing it would lead to major withdrawals. Propst has proven again that he just can’t help himself. (How many times have high school kids heard that?) Yes, everything I say is the law and you are not living in a democracy. Yes, we should recruit that kid from the other school district and make up phony grades so he will be eligible. Yes, that extra steroid shot is exactly what the player needs to be ready for the district title game. They are the Bud Kilmer of New Canaan, Texas: so revered that questioning anything they do can both get a kid in trouble or blackballed while an adult continues doing nothing to benefit his players’ future. This all goes back to the pedestal that high school coaches are put on. Propst will probably get fired for awful stuff for the third straight time from his job and some school will be so desperate to put victories on the scoreboard that they will sniff around and try to find some way to hire him. I’m all for second and sometimes third chances, but it is to the point where Propst is so untouchable that even the thought of putting in charge of a program and a bunch of young men should be nixed at the beginning. They were certainly aware of his past - and let’s not even go down the laundry list of things Propst has done - and made the hire anyway, putting the concerns of the people who should matter the most, the student-athletes at the school, way in the background. The people who made the hire are almost as guilty as the coach himself. If they try to tell you that the hiring of Propst was for anything but winning football games, it would be the biggest lie since Propst last opened his mouth. Not because what he did was funny, but just imagining the shocked reaction of those in charge of the Valdosta school district. After news broke on Tuesday that he is once again under investigation, this time at Valdosta High School for shady recruiting and use of school money, it made me laugh out loud. We have seen that over (and over and over) now with Propst. Another school will take a chance just to smell some of the success. Illegal recruiting? Just good for the program. Rush propst how to#Changing grades? Overlooked even though their job as a coach and educator is to help a student in life, not teach them how to achieve in all the wrong ways. Yet that is when they can get away with even more. Kids become in awe of them and talk about them in whispered heroics. Adults do everything but bow to these men who are larger than life. The more wins the higher that pedestal becomes. Maybe he realized that no matter what he did, it wouldn’t matter as long as he won. Coach wins games, coach becomes a huge fish in a small pond and, for some, that is when the breaking point happens. You see it throughout the country in small towns to large suburbs to the inner city. Yet the question that I have to wonder is this: was Propst always a bad guy or did the power of being put on a pedestal for so long finally break him? We now all know that that was just a farce. He was bringing national attention to the Hoover program, putting players at major colleges and, of course, winning. For all everyone knew, Propst was this upstanding guy who just happened to be one heckuva football coach. “She told me I had a man crush on him,” he once told me about his wife describing his feelings for Propst.Ĭertainly he wasn’t the only one. As a huge football fan who had kids who went to Hoover High School, he got to see some of the best teams to ever play in the state of Alabama play under the direction of Rush Propst. I have a good friend who has lived in Hoover, Ala.
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