The POP-EXPOSE ‘Coach Dumas’ by Mitchell Smith!
Coach Dumas
Most of you won’t know who Coach Dumas is, but most of you have probably had a person very similar to him in your life. So this week I am writing a story about my former coach and mentor to honor all those people who may have impacted your life from a young age and there influence has helped you throughout your life, and shaped you into the person you are today. Growing up in a small town often meant a close knit relationship with many people in town such as teachers. I knew many of my high school teachers way before they were my teacher. I worked many years for my high school biology teacher’s family restaurant, and one of my other teachers worked as a waitress there during the summer months. So it wasn’t a wonder that a special bond could be formed with teachers and students alike.
My first encounter with Coach Dumas was right around 6th grade. He was coaching girls soccer at the time and looking to recruit ball boys. So I signed up and I would retrieve soccer balls for both girls and boys. Sometimes it was a good bit of work as there was a thick wooded area on one side of the field with vines and pricker bushes crossed thick beneath the trees. All my hard work did not go unnoticed though. I would earn 75 cents, enough money to get a soda from the machine outside the school cafeteria. At that age that seemed like a million dollars. Later in high school Coach was my Science teacher, gym teacher, and my baseball coach. Coach was a master at giving out nicknames. I remember it like yesterday, 1988 playing soccer on the side lot at 7th period gym class. I was big enough to play linebacker for the JV football team only problem was, our school wasn’t big enough to have a football team, so when I went for the soccer ball I usually got the person as well, so on this particular day I was dubbed Train.
I can here him now, “You can’t run people over for the ball, Train”, and the name stuck. I was a bit of a late bloomer and there were a bunch of teachers who pushed the bar for me to try different things, Coach Dumas recruited me to play baseball and it got the ball rolling for me, after that I decided to try out other activities I played basketball, soccer, and did drama club. Coach Dumas was a long time member of Keene Valley Volunteer fire department, and I joined the Keene fire department and we worked along side each other fighting fires and competed against one another at fireman field days. It was because of Coach Dumas I stood out in a bitter cold and clear February night tracking down constellations because that is the best time to see them, he taught me it was ok to be goofy and do impressions and lip sink Kermit the Frog singing because life is short and life should be about having fun and smiling and enjoying what you love. So hats off and beers up to one of my mentors and to all the coaches and teachers out their impacting young lives around the world that are very similar to the late great Coach Dumas.
