Scouting

One of the ways that I supplemented my lack of income in college was to scout the team our football team at Manchester would play the next week.  This opportunity came to me because I had messed up my knee the week of our last high school game.  By the time I got to college it was too weak to really push off, so the coach let me be a scout.

I loved that job.  Gary Scott, who later was the long term head football coach at Norwell High School, and I traveled all over Indiana and Ohio to put together a plan for the future game.  I received a stipend, meal money, and gas money.  On Sundays we presented the information to the coaches.  A side note, to this day I think fondly of my visits to Hanover College.  What a great campus!

So when I took the assistant football job at South, I came with some skills other new assistant coaches wouldn't have.  Immediately, that was one of my primary jobs.  For the three years that I was at South, I was teamed with a different coach each year to go help our team to know what our future opponent would do.  Each of them brought varying levels of enthusiasm and strange techniques.  The one coach wanted to always leave at half time, saying that nothing new would happen.  The next coach kept saying that he would remember what he was seeing without writing it on the cards that we used.

The final coach I scouted with at South was my old line coach Walt Bartkiewcz.  We only went to one game, but it was memorable.  Walt never scouted.  He always stayed with the team, but for this game, he wanted to make sure that we got all of the information that we needed.  I remember the game was at Homestead.  The opponent that we were scouting was Dwenger.  He told me to meet him on the Dwenger side.  We never did that.  We always did our scouting on the side we were not going to play.

A little background information is needed here.  Walt had been the head football coach at Central Catholic before he came to South.  We all had heard rumors of why he left, but I never verified what happened.  Well, Central Catholic closed and many of their students went to the new Catholic school, Bishop Dwenger.  Each year that we played Dwenger, I detected that Walt was more intense than ever that whole week.

That background information allows me to finish this story.  I arrived at the game before Walt and began the ritual of getting my paperwork set up.  The kickoff reminded me that I still hadn't seen Walt.  Watching and plotting the information is a two person job.  I couldn't look around.  I had to keep my head in the game and do my job.  Half time came, no Walt.

Then at the beginning of the third quarter I heard a commotion behind me.  Police officers had taken a hooded man from the top row and were escorting him out of the game.  That voice was familiar.  The voice speaking to him sternly was a priest, "Walter, you know the rules of the conference - No filming games that you are scouting."

Walter didn't leave quietly, but he did find me in the crowd and shouted to me, "Morris, you better get this all down; they took my camera!"  Most people in the stands don't pay too much attention to scouts, usually.  That game I became very popular.

We lost the game.  Ironically, after Walt retired for South, he volunteered as a coach, guess where.  That's right - Bishop Dwenger.