Whither loyalty

 I play, coach stays. He goes, I go.

                   -- Jimmy Chitwood
 





Emma Wilson looks nothing like Jimmy Chitwood.

Like most distance runners of repute she's a mere slip of a thing, a scrap of a kid who looks as if a puff of air would carry her off like a hotdog wrapper or an exhausted autumn leaf. But do not be fooled.

There is steel in this young lady. Steel and something Chitwoodian, as IndyStar writer David Woods suggested in breaking this bombshell: Indiana's top female distance runner is no longer going to run for her high school.

That would be Greencastle High School, for whom Emma Wilson has won five state titles, two in cross country and three in track. Last month she won her second straight state title in cross country, becoming the first girl in 10 years to win back-to-back titles. Next fall, she'll be running for the University of Illinois.

But she and her high school are quits, she says. This because Greencastle last week placed her coach, former Pike High School and Butler runner Craig Jordan, on administrative leave. The reason cited was "an irretrievable breakdown in your professional relationships that cannot be resolved."

Which sounds as if Jordan has gotten crosswise with the mucketies in the school system and can't get un-crosswise.

In any event, Wilson's loyalties are clear: She's siding with her coach, whom she and many others -- including Greencastle's 2018 valedictorian Ben Gellman, now running for Colorado College -- swear by.  So she will forfeit an almost certain third state title in the 3,200 meters next spring to do what she regards as the right thing.

“They say he’s not a good coach when all the kids say they love him and want to run for him,” Wilson told the Star. “I just decided I wasn’t going to represent Greencastle anymore because of the way they treat people.”

So that's that. And, well ...

Look. I don't know much about much, but I do know this: It is fashionable, and more than a bit cliché, to say These Kids Today are going to be the ruination of everything, that they are too coddled and too entitled and just not centered enough to shoulder the responsibilities that await them. It is the endless refrain of every generation -- just as it's the endless refrain of every generation to swear that it's different this time.

It is not, of course. Our parents said the same thing about us. Their parents said it about them. Go back 2,000 years and Gaius Maximus was saying it about his ne'er-do-well son Scipio.

But somehow Scipio always turns out OK. And These Kids Today?

If Emma Wilson is any measure, it sounds like they're going to be OK, too. More than OK.