<p>All good parents want what’s best for their children — or at least what they believe is best for their children.</p>
<p>For a high school coach, however, what’s best is winning games. That goal doesn’t always line up with the goals that parents have set.</p>
<p>In recent years, more and more area coaches have been feeling the heat that comes from that friction, and they’ve been walking away — in some cases, well before they might have wanted to.</p>
<p>For Eddie Willis, the headaches were enough that he walked away from the Indian Creek baseball program in 2017 after winning back-to-back sectional titles — and with his son, Joey, still on the team.</p>[sc:text-divider text-divider-title="Story continues below gallery" ]
<p>"You know the talent on that team," Willis said of the Braves, who followed with a Class 3A regional championship in 2018. "My son was a senior this year. Why wouldn’t I want to coach that team still?"</p>
<p>Dan Burkman, who stepped down from the Indian Creek girls basketball program after the 2016-17 season, can relate. His daughter, Katie, still had two years of high school ball left, but the benefits of sticking around to coach her didn’t outweigh everything else that came with the job.</p>
<p>Burkman feels that parents often have a vision for their children, and when reality doesn’t match that vision, someone has to take the blame — and it’s usually the high school coach.</p>
<p>"Just in my experiences that I have, I think it’s twofold," Burkman said. "People have invested so much in their child and they want it to pay off. But also, sometimes parents, they gauge themselves as a parent by how well their kid performs rather than gauging by how your kid behaves and what kind of attitude they have."</p>
<p>The investment, though, may be the bigger piece of that puzzle. With travel sports considered the main path to a college scholarship, some parents are willing to funnel thousands of dollars a year into helping their children pursue that goal — and anything that is seen as jeopardizing that goal is a problem.</p>
<p>Whether they’re actually jeopardizing anything or not is often irrelevant. Lisa Whitlow-Hill, who stepped down from her job as Franklin’s softball coach after this past season, said she would often have parents bugging her about having the team’s statistics updated online because they felt that’s what college coaches were looking for.</p>
<p>Whitlow-Hill pointed out that most college softball coaches, especially at the higher levels, are making their talent evaluations in the summer — and that they’re looking for something else during the high school season.</p>
<p>In fact, she said she heard that firsthand from one major college coach recently.</p>
<p>"She’s looking … not for the stats that she can produce while she’s playing," Whitlow-Hill said, "but for the commitment — she’s committed to something, a team that may not be an elite team, for four years. The loyalty."</p>
<p>Willis echoed that sentiment, drawing on what he remembered from his conversations with former University of Dayton baseball coach Tony Vittorio. </p>
<p>"He would always tell me, ‘I don’t care how good your kids are,’" Willis said. If the parents were difficult to work with, he wasn’t interested.</p>
<p>Burkman feels that some of the pressure that parents put on high school coaches stems from the actions of the people coaching their children on summer travel teams.</p>
<p>"They over-promise and under-deliver," Burkman said. "Just because they want a kid to be on a team, they’ll convince the parents that, ‘Oh, your kid’s a Division II or Division I player,’ whatever — and that doesn’t transpire, and then it’s the high school coach’s fault. Not the travel team coach, and not the kids themselves if they’re just not talented enough."</p>
<p>Russ Milligan walked away from the Center Grove softball program this summer after winning five state championships in his 27 years — and while he didn’t specify such headaches as a reason for calling it quits, he does believe that travel teams are becoming more important to parents than high school teams because of the financial investment.</p>
<p>"When you’re looking solely at your kid, I can see where they can say, well, summer leagues and travel, where the colleges are also able to come look and recruit, they become more important to them," Milligan said. "And they’re paying all that money for it."</p>
<p>"I’ve got that in an email or a text from one parent who clearly said that," Willis added. "<em>We’ve got this amount of money invested in baseball. We need this to work out.</em>"</p>
<p>When it doesn’t — or even if a parent thinks that it might not — the high school coach often becomes the target. And in some cases, the athletic director or other school administrators will come to a coach’s defense against an outspoken parent (Whitlow-Hill, for one, said she always felt as though she had support from above).</p>
<p>"It doesn’t matter how much you win," Willis said. "It wears on the administration if they hear from parents every day, no matter if it’s the same parent every day.</p>
<p>"They could very easily have stopped this by saying, ‘Look, we’re tired of hearing from you.’"</p>
<p>When the pressure keeps coming, more often or not the end result is the coach deciding that he or she has had enough.</p>
<p>"It just was so draining," Willis said.</p>
