Worth the effort

“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”

— Albert Camus,

writer, in The Myth of Sisyphus

Slowly at first, then faster, the man makes his way through the darkness. Past the rust-stained chain-link fence and past the empty school and its empty parking lot littered with cigarette butts and crushed soda cans. He wears slacks and a suit jacket, and his maroon and yellow striped tie hangs a bit looser than it did earlier in the night. His hair, thick and black a few years ago, has thinned and grayed. Years of disappointment will do this to a man.

Snowflakes dance slowly in the February air, unconcerned, it seems, with the laws of gravity. The man is well-versed in the plight of Sisyphus. He knows what it’s like to push a rock up a hill, only to watch as it comes tumbling back down moments later. Knows what it’s like to do this day after day, week after week, year after year.

He opens the door and falls into the driver’s seat. He turns the key.

It’s a strange world, which may or may not explain why the man, the 48-year old father of three, with the new truck and the lake house, is here, walking through the double-doors of Frederick Douglass High School, dressed in a shirt and tie, and striding towards the office of principal Tim Travers.

It’s 1997. It’s been four years since Lynn Allen last coached high school basketball, since his 10-year stint as the top assistant at local power Hickman High School ended in retirement. In those 10 years, Hickman would prove to be, perhaps, the most dominant big-class high school basketball team in Mid-Missouri. The team won four district tournaments, played in the championship game of three more, and in 1986 came within four points of qualifying for the holy grail of Missouri prep hoops, the 4A Final Four.

Which is why you might find it odd that Allen is here, in an office in a school that, at the moment, has no basketball program. Hasn’t had one, in fact, in 36 years.

A school with a rich, but somewhat troubling history. A school that, when it first opened in 1887, was used as the city’s all-black school during a time of racial segregation in Columbia. A school that, after closing its doors in 1960 and bussing its students to the city’s other high school, opened them back up in 1985, as the city’s alternative school, a place for the troubled and tossed aside of Columbia youth.

A school that recently has begun talk of rekindling its basketball program. And in this office is offering Allen the head coaching job.

Allen takes a deep breath. He’s well aware of the school’s reputation. He knows of Douglass’ 50-percent dropout rate and that, in any given year, less than 10 percent of the school’s students are likely to go on to a four-year college. He knows the horror stories, the tales of what it’s like to teach what the city of Columbia has termed “at-risk” students.

He knows all these things. But he also knows that this is an opportunity to coach his own high school team. Be the man. Do things his way. After all, he had known since third grade exactly what his life’s ambitions were, since that day he looked up from his desk, locked eyes with his teacher, and stated plainly, “I’m going to be a coach.”

So now he is shaking Travers’ hand, and sure, he is saying, he will take the job.

He goes home and tells his wife, a kind, dark-haired woman who works part time as a substitute teacher in the Columbia School District. Diane Allen smiles. She, too, is familiar with Douglass and the stigma it carries. But she also understands the grip the game of basketball has on her husband. She’s been well aware of it, ever since they began dating, when she was teaching in tiny Montgomery City, and would make the 60-minute drive west to Columbia on weekends to see him, ready for a night on the town, only to find that a night on the town meant a night in the stuffy confines of one of the local high school gymnasiums, watching a basketball game.

She also knows that Allen doesn’t need the job. In addition to the retirement he is collecting, he owns a lawn mowing business and a plot of real estate in Columbia’s Lake of the Woods area, both of which bring in a significant amount of income each year. But Diane looks over at her husband. She knows he has to do this.

There isn’t much time for reminiscing here, though, because it’s already June and the new coach has only five months to put together a team from scratch.

So Allen goes to work. He spends hours on the phone over the next three months trying to put together a game schedule, a task most schools completed months ago. He persuades Travers to develop an athletic budget that is comparable to that of Hickman and Rock Bridge, and organizes fund-raisers to pay for luxuries like team shoes.

He finds an assistant coach, an easy-going man named Scotty Williams, who’s taught at Douglass eight years, and he enlists two teachers, Phyllis Masters and Polly Wohlford, to travel with the team and act as scorekeeper and trainer.

All the while, a feeling begins to form, deep in the pit of the coach’s stomach. It’s a familiar feeling. The same one he got every year at Hickman, as summer gave way to fall and fall gave way to winter, and the days crept closer to the start of basketball season. The feeling every coach knows. Anticipation. Only this time it’s different, stronger, because it’s his team. His program.

And by the time November rolls around, and all of the details have been worked out, here is Allen, standing inside Douglass’ aging gym, note card in tow, excitement washing over him as he gets set to run his first afternoon practice.

But wait a minute…how can this be?

There must be some mistake, because it’s 2:05, five minutes after the scheduled start time, and no one is here. Not a single player! 2:10…2:15. No one. He stares in disbelief. And now it’s 2:20, and as the small clock on the wall ticks away the minutes, all of his hopes and ambitions, the visions of road trips and district tournaments, begin to deflate as he stares at that empty gym.

At 2:25, a couple of potential players wander through the gym’s double doors.

Allen glances over at his assistant and the two men lock eyes, and neither has to say a word, because they’re both thinking the same thing: “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

So this is how the resurrection of the Douglass basketball program begins. And with it, the education of Lynn Allen.

It begins with players showing up late to practice that first week with blatant disregard for the 2 p.m. start time.

It begins with kids storming out of practice because they didn’t know that high school basketball was supposed to be this much work, and with the two coaches staring at an empty gym one afternoon, much like they did that first day, only this time with no one showing up, even after 25 minutes of waiting.

It begins with kids that, when they do make their way into the gym after school, are so fundamentally inept that Allen has to abandon his playbook and set up basic layup and rebounding drills, the same ones you’ll find at any little league or middle school practice.

It begins with Allen taking eight players, well below the number of an average varsity high school team, to Douglass’ first game, which is held at Missouri’s Hearnes Center. And watching one player pick up three fouls in the opening minutes of a 66-48 loss to Ladonia’s Community R-VI.

The coach sweats bullets before that game. He looks out on to the court during warm-ups, where his players nervously shuffle through drills, and wonders what’s going to happen after the game’s opening tip-off. It’s the first time most of these kids have played an organized game of basketball. Already this evening, one of the team’s players didn’t show up for the bus to the game. Are these kids ready for a game on such a lavish stage?

Allen patrols the sidelines, pacing back-and-forth, running his hand through his hair, barking out orders. But none of his worries become reality. Douglass even begins the game on top, when senior Baylen Jackson opens the scoring with a 3-pointer from the corner.

Maybe this isn’t going to be so bad after all.

One night, though, isn’t the job. Allen is becoming part maid, part chauffeur, part cook. He lugs the team’s dirty uniforms home after every game and empties them into his washing machine, because his players have a hard enough time getting themselves to games, let alone with clean uniforms. He maneuvers the streets of Columbia after practices in his Ford truck, taking players home, and he brings sandwiches and soda to away games.

There are some discipline problems, and there are some issues with player dedication. But this is a man with over two decades of coaching experience, a man who has spent a lifetime getting kids to conform to the norms of a team. He knows what to do. He will do it like he did at Hickman.

He walks into the locker room after the team loses its third game of the season, a sloppy performance against Northwest of Hughesville, glares at his players, and sneers, “You guys better be ready, because we’re going to have one hell of a hard practice tomorrow.”

The next day after school, he shows up ready to make good on his promise, ready to invoke some discipline, and finds ... two players.

He looks at Williams. “Where are they?” he asks, confused.

“Coach,” Williams answers, “I heard a couple of them say that you were going to kill them in practice. So they said ‘I ain’t coming.’”

So this is what he’s up against? Kids coming and going with casual indifference? Kids who are so undisciplined, so inexperienced in the world of organized sports, that they take minor, everyday coaching comments as personal attacks?

He will spend weeks coaching a player, spending extra time with him and integrating him into the team’s offense, to find out the kid has quit the team.

He will take on a new player at the request of a teacher, adding some much-needed cushion to his sparse roster, and, another player will flunk himself out of eligibility.

During a team scrimmage, when Allen or Williams might whistle a foul on a player, the player might storm out of the gym fuming, and not turn up again for a couple of days.

And yet, despite all the problems, this group of players, none of whom have ever played together, most of whom have never played an organized game of basketball in their lives, somehow…they’re winning. And, a lot of times, they’re doing it in dominating fashion.

The team returns from Christmas break and rattles off five straight victories, blowing past opponents by an average of almost 30 points a game. Senior Al Thompson, who transfers from Hickman halfway through the season, scores 18 points in his third game at Douglass, and quickly develops into one of the team’s top offensive threats.

But then, just as quickly, another off-the-court problem will surface to diminish the coach’s spirits.

What Allen must do, he is quickly realizing, is steel himself. Never get too high, never get too low. That’s what he has got to do if he’s going to make it here. That is what he keeps telling himself, keeps drilling into his head. But how can he help it? How do you not get too low when a player back-talks in front of the entire team, and you’re forced to suspend him for a game as punishment?

The team goes to the district tournament at the end of the season and takes highly-favored Pilot Grove to the buzzer, before losing a 61-58 heartbreaker in the game’s final seconds. Still, when the season ends, despite the team’s surprisingly-successful 14-9 record and its run in the district tournament, you can almost hear the coaches breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Then the second season starts.

Allen can count his players on his fingers this year. Graduation and academic problems take all but two from the previous season’s team, and it takes weeks to field a complete roster. So pressed is Allen that he allows a girl, a fiery point guard named Shalonda Jones, to join the team, even though it opens the floodgates to endless taunts at away games. The girl who, in the middle of a game against Prairie Home, while the crowd showers her with boos, will sink a free throw, stroll over to the sideline and stick her tongue out at her hecklers.

It’s January before the team wins its first game that second year.

distractions. From day one, he, like all of Windsor’s athletes, lived by the town’s Code, an unwritten set of athletic guidelines and expectations. One based on discipline and dedication and sacrifice and never, ever, under any circumstance, putting yourself before the team. A Code that allowed for no slip-ups, no matter how minor.

No one was to challenge this ideology, a lesson Pat Boothe, Allen’s high school teammate, learned the time he found a stick of Old Spice in an open locker during a basketball game at Knob Noster, and tossed it into his bag. The next morning, the player had barely arrived at school before the principal called him into his office and ordered him to make the 30-minute trip back to the school to return the deodorant. The same lesson the group of football players learned that Saturday morning during football season, when they snuck off to go duck hunting, and were promptly kicked off the team.

In Windsor, nothing was to get in the way of the team.

So how is he supposed to deal with this? With the apathy, the utter lack of dedication to the sport? Day after day at Hickman, he had watched the bench-warmers, the players who were too short or too slow or too skinny, dive across the court for loose balls and barrel through suicides during routine practices — playing like it was the state championship game. Then, come game time, he would watch them take their places along the sideline, where they would most likely remain for the entire game.

How was he supposed to react now, when his starters are skipping practice? When they show up late, or without their shoes?

At Hickman the coaches used to sit down together before the season and come up with ways to make the first week of tryouts so unbearably grueling that the list of 75 wannabe players would dwindle to around 25.

Now, Allen has to hope that five kids make their way into the Douglass gym each year on the first day of practice, and pray that they stay with it.

At least he has Williams. The easy-going assistant coach, who always seems so laid back, so mellow. Who won’t hesitate to jump into practice when the team needs an extra body, or load a group of players into his own car after practice and see them home. Williams, who can sit in the main office of Douglass the day after a player goes on a locker room tirade, and smile about the situation, and then, a few minutes later, have Allen smiling too.

Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt Allen to lighten up a little. Take the my-way-or-the-highway approach down a notch. The suspensions he is handing out sure aren’t helping the team’s record. After one postgame blowup, Allen suspends two players for the opening round of the Windsor Tournament – in the coach’s hometown – then watches as his team gets romped by tiny Leeton High School in front of his friends and relatives.

But lighten up? As a child, Allen would watch his father pack 16 hours of work into his day, overseeing the daily operations of the family’s hatchery, then rushing across town to carry out his duties as school board president. A man who was unable to relax even on family vacations, so ready to get back to work that he would spend the family’s travel money as fast as he could, in hopes of shortening the trip.

And this is how it continues. Allen will sit behind the wheel of the team’s tiny yellow bus as it rolls down I-70 on its way back from an away game and wonder why they just don’t get it. Why his players just won’t dedicate themselves to the game of basketball. He sees their potential; realizes that most of them have more natural talent in their little fingers than the players on the rural teams they’re losing to.

If only they shared his passion. The passion that would whisk him away on his bike at eight o’clock every morning as a child, off to the playground or the school gym to shoot baskets. The passion that led him to walk-on to the basketball team at Hannibal LaGrange Community College after high school, knowing full-well he would be riding the bench. The passion that provokes him now, as an adult, to hop in his car and drive an hour to watch a game between Sturgeon and Cairo.

But they don’t, and it drives Allen crazy. The missed practices, the locker room blow-ups. The lows that, at the moment, seem to outweigh the highs. And now, even the good times are becoming harder to enjoy. Because when a week or two passes without incident, or when the team overcomes an 8-point deficit in the fourth quarter against Missouri Military Academy to pick up its fifth win of the season, there’s always the fist of fate, ready to grab him by the collar and fling him back to reality the moment he becomes too relaxed.

“When things are going real smooth,” he will say years later, “it’s real worrisome.”

But the thing is, before he can get too low, or the idea of quitting can push itself too far into his head, something will happen to pull him back up. He will walk into the gym one afternoon during lunch period, find a kid shooting baskets, and offer him a spot on the team. Bam! A forward. Or he will return from Christmas break to news that three players who had been academically ineligible have been cleared to play. Or a player will pop out of nowhere, like 6-foot-4 John Johnson does that second year, to quickly inject a bit of hope into the team and its coach.

But then, when things are rolling, and there’s that speck of hope that maybe they’re going to stay that way, it all comes crashing down.

Like when, a couple of hours before Douglass is to play in the opening round of the Brashear Tournament in the team’s third year, the rock comes tumbling down the hill. It’s February 2000. Allen sits in the front row of the team bus as it pulls out of the Douglass parking lot. The players sit in the back of the bus, quiet. Outside, in the chilly February air, stand Brandon Robinson and Billy Nelson, two of the team’s best players, who Allen has suspended for the game after outbursts at a recent practice.

They don’t accept the punishment. Because, by God, they’re going to play in this game, and no one’s going to tell them differently. The two hop into Nelson’s old station wagon and make the two hour drive to Brashear, where Allen finds them waiting when the bus arrives. The coach tries to ignore them, tries to make it through the game, and ignore the question that has begun popping into his head: “Why am I doing this?”

But now, as problem after problem piles on, and the team’s record is nowhere near what it was in the first year, the things he took for granted at Hickman are becoming more and more apparent. The idea that if you tell a player to do something, he does it. Punctuality. Discipline. Dedication. The building blocks of athletics. At Douglass, they’re nonexistent.

And maybe there’s only so much he can do at a school like this. Maybe Douglass High School just isn’t conducive to the kind of coaching he is used to. And the comments he has started getting, from friends and family (“You’re crazy to put up with the things you put up with”), maybe there’s some truth to them.

Maybe he can’t take this anymore. Maybe he shouldn’t.

The office is cool and dark when Allen arrives, just after 9 on a chilly Tuesday morning last month. The room, a cramped, dimly-lit space which allows only for a desk and a couple of old chairs, is hidden in the corner of Douglass High School’s main office. The windowless, cream-colored walls are coated with pictures and mementos from Allen’s three decades in the coaching world. On a bulletin board in front of his desk hangs a picture of 10 teenagers, standing in two rows, smiles covering their faces. Beside it is a basketball schedule from Lewis and Clark Community College in Godfrey, Ill., the school where two of his former players are redshirting.

“Have a seat,” he says to a visitor, as he sits down and begins to shuffle through some papers on his desk.

It’s been more than five years since the night of the Brashear Tournament, since the night Allen drove home and asked himself “Why am I doing this?” A night all the frustrations seemed to rise to the surface, and he went to bed wondering whether or not the program he had spent so much time building was going to survive.

Then, the next morning, a funny thing happened. He woke up. He showered and dressed, kissed his wife, got into his car and drove to work. The next day he did it all over again. And the day after that, and the day after that. The same way he has done it everyday for the past eight years.

And somewhere along the way, somewhere in those hundreds of trips, back and forth, from his two-story Columbia home with the sprawling yard in the suburban neighborhood to Douglass’s redbrick school building, surrounded by Columbia’s public housing units, he began to realize something. He realized that at Douglass there weren’t 75 players beating down the door to play basketball, the way there are at other schools. That no matter how much he tried, and how hard he worked, that this wasn’t going to change. That these kids weren’t raised on tee-ball and little league soccer, with coaches, from day one, pushing them to succeed. These kids weren’t raised on the Code.

And he realized what he had to do was come to a peace with this reality.

It didn’t come all at once, this peace. There is no minute or hour or day that Allen can point to years later and say, “That’s it. That’s when it all began to make sense.”

Instead, it came in little moments. A glance into the stands at a home game and realizing that hardly any of his players’ parents had shown up. A player approaching him one day to ask if he could miss the team’s next game to visit his son. It starts to become clearer. The game of basketball, and how it fits into his players’ lives, is so different than how fits into his Hickman players’ lives. So different from how it fits into his life.

“What you realize,” Allen says, “is that basketball isn’t the top priority in most of these kids’ lives. A lot of times, it’s not even the second or third or fourth priority.”

Because how important is an afternoon practice to a kid who is essentially raising himself? How trivial the act of tossing a ball through a metal hoop becomes to a player trying to dodge the fate of his older brother, wasting away in a state prison. And district titles? How insignificant when you’re coaching a kid who works the midnight shift at a local gas station to support himself and his girlfriend.

“You learn things as time goes on,” Allen says. “I’ve become more aware of things that are going on in players’ lives outside of basketball, which is probably something I didn’t think much about coaching at a traditional high school. I’ve learned that second and third and fourth chances are something we need to give kids. I’ve learned never to give up on a kid. I never want to eliminate a kid. If it’s going to happen, I want him to eliminate himself, but I want the opportunity to be there for him.

“You know, at Hickman, success was about getting the maximum athletic talent out of the players. It was much more about the Xs and Os. Every year the coaches’ ultimate goal was a state championship. I was never worried about punctuality or grades or showing up.

“At Douglass, you realize that it’s about trying to mold a group of kids together into a functional team, getting the players to buy into the system, what we’re trying to teach. It’s about taking care of responsibilities in the classroom. And getting them to behave on and off the court. And if we do those things, we feel like we’re going to be pretty successful. That may not always translate into as many wins as we’d like, but…”

Allen trails off.

“I think at Douglass it’s just learning to accept the best effort and letting the chips fall where they may.”

But maybe you’re not convinced. Because after all, how does a man transform himself when almost his entire coaching career has centered on winning games? How does a man stuck smack dab in the middle of a win-at-all-costs high school sports culture break the mold?

Maybe you need to hear it from the mouth of someone else. Like the opposing fan, who, after watching Douglass lose to North Shelby High in 2002, was so impressed with the conduct of the Douglass players and coaches that he wrote a letter to the school, which read in part: “Sometimes I wonder if sportsmanship is still a part of teaching, but am glad to see (at) your school (it is).”

Or maybe the words of Glenn Cobbins, Sr., say it better, a man whose son, Brandon, developed into an all-state guard for Douglass in 2002: “Coach always expressed the importance of education, discipline, and just overall communication. And the importance of becoming a well-rounded human being, period. Even when I wasn’t there for (Brandon), because of my past, the coaches were always there. Always there.”

But perhaps those voices are too distant. Maybe we’ve got to get closer. To someone who has been there from day one. Someone who has experienced the roller coaster ride for himself, has weathered the storm, and has seen the transformation of his close friend and colleague. Someone like Scotty Williams.

“When he got here, I think he wanted to do things like he had at Hickman,” says Williams, who, after coaching a group of Douglass players on a city league team two years before the program started, was well-versed in dealing with its at-risk students by the time Allen arrived in 1997. “He wanted the kids to be on time, he wanted them to hustle at all times. But he had to make an adjustment with his coaching, because he knew that this was an alternative school, and some of these kids couldn’t handle the strict coaching. So he adjusted his style. Became more patient. Instead of kicking a player out of practice, now he’ll take them out into the hallway and talk to them, then he’ll send them back in.”

Somewhere along the way, through the years and the players and the teams and the games, Allen realized that he had to stop trying to fit his players into his idea. And that, in the end, what he needed to do, what he had to do, was fit himself into theirs.

This is not to say, of course, that everything is smooth sailing these days.

The labor hasn’t changed much over the years. It’s still the roller coaster ride it was in the beginning. There remain the little problems, the daily battles with discipline and punctuality and truancy. And there remain the larger ones. During the 1998-99 season, Allen was forced to kick a player off the team after the player chased a teammate down Providence Road with a baseball bat. Another year, when Douglass qualified for the championship game of the Stover Tournament, only six of the team’s eight players showed up for the game.

“It was a Saturday night,” Allen says, “And I guess they just had other things to do.”

Even the past season, which Allen considers the team’s best in terms of behavior and parental involvement, had its share of letdowns. Anthony Massengale, the team’s 6-foot-3 junior center and its most promising player heading into next year, has stopped going to class since the season ended. Player grades, while usually high during the basketball season, have a habit of dropping once it ends, and though six players are eligible to return next season, it’s unlikely all will.

“I don’t know if you can ever really get used to it,” Allen says. “You know you’re going to be let down sometimes, and there’s disappointment everyday. It’s a continuous thing. You don’t accept it; you just try to get it right.”

Any thoughts Allen might have had at the program’s start, of state tournaments or district titles, have long since been retired. Even in 2002, when the Bulldogs finished 21-5 and advanced to the title game of the district tournament, luck and timing had as much to do with it as anything.

So he’s finding success in other things now.

When he and Williams held practice on Martin Luther King Day, though students had the day off school, you can’t imagine his joy when each of the team’s 10 players showed up. “That’s a record,” he says proudly. When he walks into the locker room after a game and finds that players have honored his rule of waiting for his postgame speech before changing out of their uniforms? Priceless. And that eight-point run the Bulldogs went on against Sturgeon this season, when they came back to the sideline laughing and giggling and high-fiving, even though it made little difference in the game’s outcome? Allen loved it.

And this is why he is able to sit here, in his cramped office at Douglass, with his feet propped up onto his desk and his hands clasped behind his head, and smile as he reflects back on his past eight years at the school. Why he is able to show up, year after year on that first day of practice, not for the money or the recognition, but because he thoroughly enjoys what he is doing. Enjoys it in a way that only someone who has been through the storm can enjoy it.

“That’s why you do it,” Allen says. “So hopefully these kids become good adults. Start good families. Get an education. Get a feel for something they really like to do. It’s a huge high for all teachers and coaches, to know that maybe you were part of a kid getting a partial or full scholarship. Knowing that maybe the basketball program was a reason for them to come to school, an incentive for them to get an education.”

Which brings us back to the man in the truck.

The engine is idling. The man sits behind the wheel. Hours earlier, his team finished a dismal season. Douglass finished the 2004-2005 season 6-19, its worst record in six years. It had been outscored by nearly 15 points per game, and had lost eight games by 30 or more points. In the Bulldogs’ final game of the season, in the first round of the district tournament, they lost to Salisbury by 40.

The team started this season with 10 players, ended it with eight. All of the familiar problems found their way back.

The man is pulling the truck into drive now, and it’s creeping slowly forward. Sometimes a man does all he can do, sacrifices his time and energy, thrusts himself so completely into a cause, and winds up right back where he started. Sometimes he puts everything he has into his labor, day after day, week after week, year after year, only to come to the harsh realization that, in the end, it might not have made much of a difference.

Maybe that is what Lynn Allen is thinking, as he turns onto Providence Road, away from Douglass High School, away from the gym where he stood slack-jawed during that first practice eight years ago, when it seemed like his new adventure might be over before it started.

Maybe that is what he is thinking.

But on his face., hard to make out through the shadows. Through the darkness.

Is that … a smile?