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Weekly UpdatesThe right engine was surging, and the little fixed-wing was in trouble. Somewhere just below the gathering storm clouds the Colorado Rocky Mountains jutted into the sky like gray guardians, daring the airplane to just try it, to get just close enough.
In the back of the plane, a sick baby, born premature, and the infant's mother. They boarded in Grand Junction and were headed for Children's Hospital. Flight for Life, they called it. Only by now, with an engine failing and the plane losing altitude, this trip wasn't just about the infant's life. Storms tossed the plane, with its sickly engine, like a toy. For the pilot, Tom Van Buskirk, it was all about altitude. Find a way to stay high enough over the menacing mountaintops. Get past the threat.
The voice that came from nowhere was a familiar one.
"I was wondering how I was going to make it over the Continental Divide, and there was Frank, on my shoulder," Van Buskirk says.
The voice of a sixth-grade basketball coach, a man who once insisted Van Buskirk sit out practices and do his homework instead of driving for layups, was guiding the frightened pilot over the mountains. "He was saying, 'I know it looks tough right now, but don't quit, ''' Van Buskirk recalls. "We made it over the Divide and to the hospital."
Nearly everyone who has played youth sports has a coach memory. Van Buskirk's helped save his life. He hasn't forgotten.
When he isn't running an aviation company near Centennial Airport, Van Buskirk spends his time counseling youth sports coaches. They run the gamut: experienced former pros who coach high school teams to little-league volunteers recruited by a neighbor kid's mom. The Denver-based non-profit business he started in 1993, Positive Coaching, helps clueless volunteers and veteran know-it-alls alike learn what it takes to be a great coach.
Van Buskirk isn't about Xs and Os. He teaches the hard stuff: how to prevent injuries; how to cool off before dealing with an outraged parent who can't believe his 10-year-old was yanked for a reliever; how to stand up to a school administrator who wants you to bend the rules just a bit because the playoffs are coming up.
Van Buskirk thinks coaching is harder now than it was when he coached a daughter's basketball team in 1982. Parents are more intrusive. Schools are less supportive. Club leagues have turned recreational sports into quasi-professional, pressure-cooker environments. Good coaching matters more than ever.
On weekends, Van Buskirk stands in front of a roomful of coaches, seated theater-style, at his south Denver office. Many are there because they have to be. The Colorado High School Activities Association demands that coaches who don't teach full-time earn a coaching certificate. CHSAA steers coaches to Positive Coaching for training.
It's a nonprofit business, but that doesn't mean Van Buskirk escapes competition. A handful of national training organizations do the same thing, and Van Buskirk has to convince coaches they're better off getting training from him than from a distant group that churns out online lesson plans. (Reluctantly, Van Buskirk is introducing an online training program to keep up.)
The money isn't much. Van Buskirk supplements his fees (a high-school clinic costs $950 for up to 12 coaches) by courting corporate sponsors and by recruiting volunteers to pour beer and margaritas at fundraising booths staged at Denver's People's Fair and the Cherry Creek Arts Festival. Recently he and his wife, Mary Ann, a counselor and author, have added non-sports seminars for couples who want to improve communications skills.
But sports remain Van Buskirk's passion. He'd give up the aviation business tomorrow if he could figure out a way to make the numbers work.
"Kids who play sports are better students," Van Buskirk says. "And later in life they're better employers and employees."
Now that's positive thinking.
Stewart Schley writes about sports, media and technology from Englewood. Read this and Schley's past columns on the Web at cobizmag. com and e-mail him at ss_edit@comcast.net
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