The Coach
Mountain View was losing. It was halftime. Everyone was in the locker room blaming and pitying themselves. There was lots of time left to bring it around. 5 more minutes until halftime was over. T.C. looked round. “Time to go back” he said. He led the team to the field. Quarter of the way back he taps his head. He turns to me and asks “Can you go back to the locker room and get me my sunglasses?“I nod and run back to the locker room. T.C. wears his glasses everywhere. I found the glasses and took a picture of them. I put them in my pocket it and ran back. I saw T.C. and handed him the glasses. He says thanks and goes back to watching the game.
By Diego Osorio
An hour or so later the game is over. Mountain View lost. It was a devastating loss. I walk back with the team but remember that I left my camera bag on the field. I walk back to my bag. Right next to my bag I saw the glasses on the floor broken. I took a picture of them and picked up the broken sunglasses. I tried to give the glasses back to T.C. but he was busy. In the locker room he gave a speech about the loss while holding his baby. He talks about how the football team and his daughter is the only thing he has. He is tearing up. He is quiet for a few seconds then he walks outside the room and hands the baby to his wife. I follow him to give him the glasses but he walks in the office to talk to the coaches about the lost. Not knowing what to do I hand the glasses to his wife.
During the weekend I think about the glasses. T.C. wears them every day during practices. Why would he take them off during the game? Then a thought came to me. What if he broke them himself after this team lost. Why would T.C. break his trademark glasses? Was the loss so bad that he had to take his anger out on something? During halftime he was laughing and chatting with the coaches outside. He did not seem bummed. Why would a man who does a million things for the kids on the Mountain View High School football team do something so primal? It then hit me, T.C. had lost control of his emotions and he was so mad that
that he had to hide his feelings and take his anger out on his poor sunglasses. That or someone on the football team stepped on them. T.C. has never been known as a man who is easy to get along with. Every player at one point has had a complaint about him. However everything he does is always for the team. I met T.C. a year before I decided to write about him. He tried to recruit me to play. All my friends played but I was the only one that didn’t. I told him no. I would see him at school every once in a while when he worked at the school to keep an eye on his players. He would always come up and say hi to everyone. He would shake
do it on. I spent days thinking. Then I asked my friends. “T.C.” they said “He would be the most honest”. A few days later we were on the football field. T.C. was driving by and saw us. It was 7:15. He came up and asked everyone how they were doing. He then talked about how he thinks the season was going to be then. It was 7:45. The subject went to how I was not doing football. My friends began to laugh. T.C. on the other hand was stone-faced. He looked at me. I knew I did not want to join. I did not want to hurt my moneymaker face and beautifully toned body. I told him no.
I would have to follow the team around. He smiled and said “There are no secrets.” He then did a mini work out with the players. He looked at his watch. It was 8:30. “I need to go home my wife is going to be mad.” He booked it and went home. But to really get to know T.C. you have to look at his past. Which he will happily answer. T.C.’s full name is Toure Carter. He was raised in a bad area of Ohio. He never met his dad. His mom was a drug addict. T.C. not wanting to be around that, joined track and field, basketball, and football. At the time, T.C. was a young man with-
every ones hand even mine. He would crack jokes and tell people the plan for the day at practice. After I found out of the assignment, I had no one to
He asked if I wanted to just help out. I said I would, only if he would allow me to write my paper about him. He nodded. I told him
out a family until he joined the football team. “I could stay at home and watch my mom do drugs and stay up in a room and smoke crack
or have a ton of people in my house, or go outside and become somebody and for me nothing mattered but to go out there and do what my coach asked me to do and hang around my neighborhood buddies.” said T.C. when asked if the football team was another family. Football saved his life and he stuck with it. T.C. went to Ashland University on a football scholarship. He then went to the Browns training camp but was cut. T.C. then went off to play professionally in the Arena Football League. He played for many years. When he played in the Bay Area on the San Jose Saber-Cats he began to coach Mountain Views rivals, Los Altos in 2009. The next year he went to Mountain View High School. That year the old head coach was leaving so T.C. got the head coach positions. That same year was the year he left the AFL. Many players on the team say that T.C. could go back to the AFL if he wanted to. He definitely has the talent. When asked about recent news about high school football T.C. has very strong views. In Memphis a teen was killed after a concussion went untreated.(Smith) Which T.C. takes very seriously but he also knows that some kids don’t take concussions seriously and don’t like to tell anyone when they have one. The first game of the season was over. Mountain View lost. I asked T.C. if I could get a picture of him and his family. “Sure” he said while holding his baby. “Look at the camera he was saying over and over. He and his wife spent a minute getting their daughter Lailah to look at the camera. I took the picture. T.C. and his wife looked toward the field. One of the coaches was talking to the team after the lost. T.C. looked at his wife and said “We should not scold them on the field in front of people” He then looked at the other coach and began to yell “LARNELL GET OFF THE FIELD, DO THAT AT THE..”. His wife looks at Lailah and sees T.C. yelling in Lailah’s ear. “Don’t yell in her ear.” says T.C.’s wife. This stops the yelling and they walked back to the locker room. After losing the first game, T.C. still has 9 games left in the season. Questions still arise if he will go back to the AFL. T.C. has been offered many opportunities to coach at other high schools. Joke or not Senior Chad Schaumburg hopes that T.C. stays at Mountain View. “T.C. cares about the team and gives up so much time and everything he has just for the team. He pushes way too hard now but I know when I look back at it in a few years I will know he did it for us.” If T.C. does come back he has his work cut out for him. He needs to go recruit players for Varsity and JV. T.C. needs players. This year he has been working players extra hard because around the bay area there has been a shortage in players.(Borello) Most starters go both ways and play the whole game. When T.C was asked about it he said “It’s kinda of one of those things when you have the team but don’t have the number, you
have to push the player to the brink in terms of working out. If we had 40 players it would be easy and we would not have to push the guys as hard. But I believe the harder you push a young man to the brink and past his capabilities the better the young man is.” T.C. knows that there are some players on the team that just want the jersey and to mark it down on a college app. Two weeks before the game a player was out of practice because of a groin injury. A doctor said that the player would be out for a couple of days, however he was out for a week. “Hey, how come you are not stretching out or icing your groin?” said T.C. “I have coach it’s just that I do it at home…” he said. In his eyes you could see that he was fine. He just wanted to take a few days off.
“Sure ok.” said T.C. disapointed. T.C. began to talk to another player and walked away. I followed along. “You don’t take shit from anyone do you coach?” I asked. “No, I don’t have time to waste it on people that don’t need it.” he says as he walks to a drill that was happening. I guess T.C. doesn’t have time for one thing, people there just for the the jersey.
T.C.’s other Family