And the kids are not going to have their agent call me and say, ’He’s going to go to another organization.’ "I’m not going to get fired as the coach. "There is nothing at stake," Udinski is the first to say. For these kids, football fame is not in the cards and not the point. That’s maybe Pop Warner Division I-teams that come from bigger towns and cities with more teams-not II. That’s about as far as any of these kids will ever go the really good Junior Midgets, like Reece, Cole, Gresko, Kendrick, they might be able to make a team at a small college. He has another son who plays high school ball, and his oldest is off at college now, quarterbacking a Division III team.
Like all other Pop Warner coaches, he gets paid exactly nothing.
Five hundred miles in one day he’ll go, alone, studying Junior Midget games. It’s in November, and he’ll pick a day to celebrate, a Sunday, when there’s a Junior Midget game at 9 a.m. Like, for his birthday, the one day he can do whatever he wants. It’s tough to say who felt it worse, the kids or the coach. They lost in the first round at Disney last year and went home. Like you just got shot through the chest. Losing? Honestly, they had forgotten what it felt like to lose. Winning is communion, winning is sacrifice and pain, winning is a kind of birth. Youth sports involve a collective emotion unmatched at higher levels of play. Undefeated-and then throw a trip to Disney World on top of it? A Pee Wee couldn’t soar much higher than that, and neither could a Pee Wee parent or a Pee Wee coach.
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