One of my best coaches

Editor's note (me):  This is as self-serving  and eggregiously unprofessional so if you prefer to go track down area 400-meter times, golf scores or even break off for a movie trivia quiz on Sporcle I encourage you to do so now.

I have had the honor of playing and competing for some darn good coaches during my lifetime. I wrestled for Coach Al Baxter at Buena Vista University after Randy Ray served as my high school coach. I pulled on pads for Wally Sheets and Bob Potter, who was also one of my track coaches at Cedar Rapids Washington. Rick Netolicky babysat me during the summer, keeping me out of trouble as I tried to play second base for him.

They taught me a lot, but seemed to reinforce more lessons than actually introducing me to them. Mainly because I had a coach at home in my father, Kenneth "Kenny" Pilcher, who passed away Thursday.

He is the on who exposed me to the ideas that hard work is work worth doing, do things because they are the right things to do and not because of the reward, and eliminating the words "quit" and "can't" from my vocabulary.

My father left a mark on a number of young men during his days as a City League and Babe Ruth baseball coach. He loved baseball and I think he loved giving youths an opportunity to play even more.

Summers when I was young were spent chasing around his baseball teams, picking up bats, chasing foul balls and carrying ugly green equipment bags for the 13-15 year-old teams. Daniels Park, Jones Park, Roosevelt, McKinley and Thomas Park in Marion were some of the stops.

Being quite a few years younger than the players, I often was picked on and teased. They were still fun times. It was time well spent as I was exposed to the ideas of selflessness and service to others.

See, Dad never cbarged kids to play, finding sponsors to give as much as they could. He often took three kids he had to cut when his 15-player roster was full and formed a taxi squad, scheduling scrimmages in nearby towns so they had a chance to play as well. During double-headers, he made sure the players who didn't start the first game started and played at least half of the second game. He wouldn't fit in well with some present-day youth coaches, who actually count their wins or brag about how "they" coached a team to victory and have a win-at-all-cost attitude.

Gerry Ford, the founder of Perfect Game, once told me that dad was the perfect youth coach.

Once a kid quit because he couldn't get a ride to practices or games, so dad offered to pick him up and drop him off for each. He did that with a number of his ball players. I can easily recall riding around town, making a lot of stops until we arrived home, which was sometimes a quick stop as he readied to go in for a night shift at the factory he worked for 32 years.