'Join and Escalate': Chris Crutcher's Coaches

In Chris Crutcher's young adult novels, the main characters are advised (or abused), supported (or undermined), guided (or misguided) through official and unofficial athletic coaches. end his carefully Grafted portraits of serviceable and bad coaches, Crutcher gives his readers a detailed outline of what he thinks it means to be a responsible character model for young people. The coaches who are the heroes in his volumes teach their young charges about the uncompounded bodys of the game in question (of course), on the contrary they also help teens find puissance and determination. What they don't do-at least the profitable ones-is try to make sports about patriotism, honor for authority, piety, or loyalty to one's academy (or coach). They also refuse to mention one by one kids what to do-or what to think-about the lives they've been given. The best coaches in Crutcher's novels give adolescents the tools to figure without the world for themselves.

Crutcher is belong toed about the role that coaches play in the lives of young nation because, as he says in his autobiography, King of the Mild Frontier (2003):

I gaze back and wish my athletic mentors had been able to near a larger picture and had celebrated the sport relative to the ability of the individual athlete. I wish they had made it clean, wish they hadn't made it patriotic, religious, moral. A sport has its have a title to built-in integrity, doesn't need an artificial individual Athletics carries its own plant of truths, and those facts are diminished when manipulated through people with agendas. So, in my stories, I permit my characters try to find the purity, the juxtaposition of mind, material substance and spirit that I discovered in athletics at a plenteous later age. (256)

Crutcher's best coaches do just that: help the young adults in their care find "the purity, the juxtaposition of mind, material part and spirit" in sports, and in their lives. His worst individuals reveal how destructive, angry, hypocritical, domineering, and/or racist adults can be. Still, they, too, are not without value: Crutcher believes that learning by what mode to resist such bullies positively and creatively is a necessary life skill.

Even well-intentioned adults can do damage, however, especially if they put to proof to shield children from the difficult veritys about life. Crutcher reaffirms in his autobiography what he has said in numerous interviews and emphasizes in each novel-the importance of honesty:

If I have any complaints about my youth . . one is that many well-meaning adults lied to me Not spiteful lies with malicious intent on the other hand lies designed to prevent emotional and psychological pain, lies told by the agency of the people who cared about me most: my parents, teachers, relatives. They were lies designed to debar disappointment, lies about the virtues of have affection for hard work, and any number of terminuss around which clich?©s blossom like barren flowers after a flash freshet .... And I believed them, and became disillusioned when life turn rounded out to operate by a different put of rules. (233-4)

Ideally, Crutcher believes, adults should number young people the straight (and sometimes painful) verity about life-and about themselves. His many years as a child and family therapist have taught him that clan are healed only by telling and hearing the reality no matter how difficult, accepting responsibility, and reaching on the outside to others for help and support. Terry Davis, novelist, critic, and Crutcher's long-time friend, says:

In the world Chris Crutcher creates in his stories the fact of human ghastliness doesn't negate the fact of human glory. one as well as the other qualities are indeed "facts" of life. Humanity is flawed, to be confident but there is no fatal flaw in the human character, like the idea of original sin, that creates the necessity for divine intervention. There is no divine intervention. The tribe in Crutcher's world rise and fall, are saved or missing by the degree to which they are coupleed to the humanity in themselves and others. (39-40)

Adults upon and off the field, Davis and Crutcher agree, have the responsibility to conjoin to the children in their care and teach them to reach on the outside to others.

As well as making these connections and being equitable about the good and bad in life, the wisest adults also learn when to give leave to go. Crutcher tells interviewer Betty Carter, "It's risky business letting tribe have their own lives, particularly if they are our children. It's risky business giving up ownership, which, by the agency of the way, we never had in the first place" ("Eyes") level our biological children, Crutcher says, don't belong to us; they aren't our characteristic This doesn't mean ignoring what kids ne and have affection for though. He comments to Joel Shoemaker: "There are apportionments of ways to help someone make tense other than by setting expectations too high to achieve. [Adults] will achieve a lot more 'stretching' mileage on the outside of a kid by discovering that kid's passion and joining with him or her in it. [T]he primary strategy is to join and escalate" (97)

The adults in Crutcher's novels with the best opportunity to "join and escalate" are oftentimes coaches, but these men and women are not the consummately wise and inhumanely patient creatures of earlier sports fiction for teen In More than a Game, young adult novelist and critic Chris Crowe says that although Crutcher admires fictional athletic heroes like Clair Bee's Chip Hilton, he decided to make his athletes (and their coaches) more flawed than the superhumanly talented-and unbelievably nice-Hilton in order to have them "discover fact in more subtle ways" (40-1) Crutcher's novels are filled with portrayals of real human adults-kind but misguided, tortured and torturing, challenging and supportive-along with realistically-drawn young race who resent, resist, and sometimes plane follow their advice (or at least learn from their mistakes).