How do you tell a coach he’s gone?
The dean of Fayette County basketball coaches may have coached his last game, but Geibel Catholic’s Ken Misiak isn’t the only county basketball coach who will be missing from the sidelines next season. Frazier’s Larry Mikesell has been replaced by one of his assistant coaches from last season, Ed Keebler. Mikesell coached Frazier boys basketball for 33 years. Mikesell will return for his 23rd year as the Commodores golf coach. Mikesell retired as a teacher a few years ago.
And in Connellsville, assistant principal Nick Bosnic has been replaced on the boys basketball bench by a former assistant. Nick’s brother Dan Bosnic was hired to replace him. Dan Bosnic has retained Leo Lowney, who also assisted Nick, as an assistant coach.
What differentiates those basketball coaching situations from that of Misiak, the Gators’ only boys basketball coach and a 49-year veteran, is the existence of a school board. Misiak never had to answer to such a nine-member elected board. If he had, who knows how long he may have served or whether he’d have been able to leave of his own volition?
Mikesell was dismissed by the Frazier school board without having been offered a chance to resign or retire. He was the coach one day and not the coach the next. There’s a difference between 33 and 49 (16, for the non-math majors out there), but you’d think 33 years of service would afford an employee certain courtesies.
Such is life working at the whim of a school board, a life Misiak never had to endure.
Bosnic’s case was different yet similar. He was the boys basketball coach and chemistry teacher at Connellsville before he accepted the assistant principal’s position. Once he did that, he stayed on as coach for a year. The board, noting a policy that administrators cannot serve as coaches, asked him to step down, knowing full well that as his employer, the board held pretty much all 52 cards in the deck.
That’s neither right nor wrong, simply the way it is.
Which leads us, like it or not, to the New York Mets firing of manager Willie Randolph, whose demise had been rumored for weeks before he was let go a few nights ago. Team management was ripped apart by local media because the firing didn’t happen until several hours after the Mets’ West Coast game. It was later explained that the general manager thought it would have been disrespectful to fire Randolph while he was wearing a Mets uniform.
So where’s the connection? Randolph didn’t manage the Mets for anything close to 49 years, but it was at least perceived that his dismissal was mishandled.
Which leads us to the real question: Is there a right way or a wrong way to tell an employee his or her services are no longer needed?
As a supervising employee of the Herald-Standard, I must say that my official position on Misiak or any coach of any sport is as follows: We support the coach for as long as he or she is the coach.
Having said that, it must be pointed out that there is no perfect way to do what the Geibel Catholic administration did. Maybe a phone call wasn’t the best course, but would it have been better, for example, for the administration to force Misiak to drive to Connellsville, a 20-minute one-way trip, to be told he is not wanted? At four bucks a gallon?
I realize that it must be tough to walk away from a job you’ve been doing for 49 years, but I am certain Misiak was given the chance to retire from the position, instead of having to announce that the position was being opened.
That is not exactly leaving on one’s own terms, but it comes pretty close.
Sports editor Mike Ciarochi may be reached at mciarochi@heraldstandard.com