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| Steve Mandl, the baseball coach at George Washington High School in Washington Heights, looks toward opening day tomorrow and remembers how it all began.It was the end of October eight years ago. He was just another new gym teacher at an overcrowded, academically troubled New York City high school. Then the baseball coach quit, pleading burnout, and when word got out that Steve Mandl had once played ball, he got the job; no one else wanted it. He didn’t tell anyone that teaching gym had so demoralized him that he planned to be gone by March, when the season started.“Kids started coming up to me in the halls and asking, ‘When are tryouts? When does practice start?’ ” he says now. “So I started a baseball club. The first day I walked into the gym and there were about a hundred kids there. I picked up a bat and started hitting ground balls. Everything changed for me in that moment.“I had a happiness I hadn’t had in years — just hearing the ball hit the bat, seeing the kids running. They could see I knew my stuff. When I left that evening, I was walking on air. I thought, ‘Why did I wait so long?’ ”“Sometimes when I’m coaching third base, I think to myself, ‘I can’t believe I’m here,’ ” he said the other evening after an exhibition doubleheader. “I never thought I could help anybody with anything. I was never the kid who wanted to be fireman or a doctor. What did I care about anybody else? I was going to be a baseball player and get all the glory. Now, I just want to do the job. Let the kids get the glory.”
Once the game starts, the coach is always on. Some coaches rarely leave the bench. Coach Mandl never sits down. When his team is at bat, he coaches third himself, and as he flashes the signs from the coaching box, he is an older but no less intense version of the competitor he once was on the mound. He is totally in the game, but he is calm. And he never yells. The coach’s office is a cramped room in the clubhouse under the stands, with a stained, sagging sofa and a battered metal desk. But waiting to confer with his players there one afternoon in early March, the coach looked around with a hopeful smile. “Once the season starts,” he said, “this place has a mystical atmosphere.” Intensity, but No Yelling |
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See Tomorrow's Stars Today!
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