Coaching collegiate athletics is anything but a typical 9-to-5 job. The hours are long and late, intense and unforgiving. There is little time off and even fewer sick days. The position is rewarding yet can become unreasonably harsh within the blink of an eye.
When weight training conflicts with picking up the groceries or a recruiting trip falls on an important birthday, there has to be someone to pull everything together.
Those late nights that Herb Brooks, coach of the 1980 United States “Miracle” Olympic champion hockey team, made famous aren’t a figment of the imagination or embellished in the corresponding film — they’re a reality.
Men’s basketball coach John Groce and his wife Allison are among the select group of men and women who married into that reality.
“She’ll tell you that she knew what she signed up for when we got married. I was already coaching at that point,” John Groce said. “I admire coaches’ wives a great deal. They sacrifice a lot.”
The level of involvement between coaches’ spouses differs. When Ohio women’s soccer coach Stacy Strauss walks through her front door at night, her mind is no longer on the game she finished or the practice she endured but is instead focused on the time she is able to spend with her husband, John Ellis.
Joe Carbone, Ohio’s baseball coach, doesn’t have a choice, though. His biggest critic is not a heckler who frequents Bob Wren Stadium but the person who sits across the kitchen table.
“Joe’s actually pretty good. He won’t talk about the game when he gets home,” said Pat Carbone, his wife. “I’m usually the one who brings it up. I’ll usually ask him questions like, ‘Why did so-and-so do this?’ Or ‘Why did you put this pitcher in when you did?’ Or something to that effect.”
The toughest stretch for coaches and their spouses is recruiting. The road trips can seem endless, and the phone calls tend to pile up.
Groce even claimed that he is home with Allison more during the regular season than during the summer months, as recruiting eats up the time he could be spending at home.
For Strauss, it’s the little things that add to the grind.
“It means, for example, if a recruit under a certain age calls me to talk about Ohio University, I’m not allowed to call them back,” she said. “So I have to take the call. That’s meant a lot of disrupted dinners, having my phone with me all the time and always on. That’s what it takes.”
The sacrifice of being a coach is limited not only to their relationships with their significant others. Even though they teach games for a living, being a parent and a coach is far from child’s play.
“For example, I’ve missed every game my son has played on Saturdays for upward bound, and I’ll miss again this Saturday because we have shoot-around,” Groce said. “I’ve made one. So she does all that.”
But other times, it can bring people together. Ohio hockey coach Dan Morris met his wife Emily while having dinner at Lucky’s Sports Tavern with former Ohio captain Paul Warriner, a recruit at the time.
Morris was hoping to walk away with early signs of a commitment but ended up getting a stronger one than he had ever bargained for.
“While we were there — it was my first year coaching — my wife came in. She wasn’t my wife at the time, but that’s how we met,” Morris said.
In their real first date only a short while later, the new couple had their first kiss in the mezzanine at Bird Arena, where Morris goes to work every day.
It’s not an art or a science, each of the coaches pointed out, but more of an equilibrium that is found on a case-by-case basis.
“The one thing about wives is that they feel every loss and every win,” Groce said. “The losses tend to linger longer than the celebration over a win, so I admire coaches’ wives. It’s hard.”
jr992810@ohiou.edu
