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With each passing year, the number of coaches in attendance for the fall roundtable meeting with IHSA assistant executive director Beth Sauser grows smaller. Honestly, it’s basically the same coaches that meet with Sauser every year, turning the roundtable meeting into a mini reunion.
Some coaches have said it’s a waste of their time to hear the same answers from Sauser year-after-year, while others have said nothing has really changed since the meetings started.
But let’s give credit where credit is due.
Coaches complained for years that the IHSA hadn’t meet with them since the days when Dave Fry was executive director. While it’s only a “one-hour maximum” meeting, Sauser has hosted an open-door meeting for all coaches at each state quarterfinal for at least three or four years now.
That’s a start, right?
One of the topics Sauser is sure to hit this Friday, as she did last Friday, will be to explain the move to three classes - A, AA and AAA - next year.
According to most coaches, there isn’t a school in the state that won’t allow head coaches to attend the state finals. Meaning, it’s a professional (off)day.
Will the same 15 coaches be in attendance for Friday’s meeting, which will take place after the second quarterfinal game around 3 p.m. at North Central College in Naperville?
Or will others, who complain and moan, make an appearance to voice their thoughts?
-Joe Trost
Cell Phone Alerts
Joe:
Are you the same guy from the Star newspapers? When I started reading your blog I thought the name sounded like someone I read before. I searched and found this on you. I loved your columns at the Star and so did my family. Good to see you back. Thought you would like to see this.
Fire readies to run the table for 2000 season
Published on: 10/15/2000
A HUGE LOSS: Joe Trost, the award-winning soccer columnist and reporter for The Star Newspapers in the south suburbs, is leaving his post after five incredible years. He'll be joining the Bright One - the Chicago Sun Times sports department in just a few days. For him it's a deserved career opportunity that he couldn't pass on, but for the local soccer community it's a huge problem.
Trost has been legendary crusader for telling the story about soccer in the southwest corner of the Chicago metro area. His hard work and dedication are known to just about everyone in the soccer community and he will be sorrowfully missed.
His leaving will create a huge void in the soccer coverage at all ages. It's a situation that too many people in the soccer community have come to take for granted. Only a few us really know how many hours he toiled to get stories done, finish photo layouts, plan banquets, arrange all-star showcases, and dozens of other activities that made him the youthful Prince of Soccer Coverage in the Chicagoland area.
As with many manpower shifts in business, people will suddenly come to realize that it will actually take not one, two, or even three people to fill the coverage of events and activities that young Joe Trost has help to create during the past five years. It will take a small army - which won't happen!
So - for the many of us who have come know Joe (and the few us that have had a chance to work with him) we'll all miss his tall, lanky shadow along the sidelines of soccer fields across The Star circulation coverage area. It just won't be the same, but he's left a rich legacy for the next regime.
We'll all miss his biting attacks, his demonstrative praise, his youthful energy, his wild photo layouts, his commitment to getting both sides of the story, and his endless love for the game.
TROST RESPONDS: I never left. And thanks for the post - a lot of good memories from how it all started.