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LANDIS — Dwayne Fink stares at the South Rowan baseball field through a pouring rain and flashes of lightning, smiles sadly and gives three reasons why he has resigned as South’s baseball coach.
Each of the reasons make some sense. Each helps explain why Fink, who doesn’t turn 35 until this summer, won’t be in his familiar spot in the third-base coaching box at South next spring.
First, there’s Fink’s son, Jacob, who will play organized ball for the first time this summer.
“Jacob’s baseball is something I’m not willing to miss,” says Fink. “You can’t do it over. I’ve gotten a lot of advice and everyone says you can’t replace those years with your child. You hear a lot of people say they wish they’d spent more time with their kids.”
There’s no question that the time demands of coaching high school sports are increasingly difficult to deal with for family men and women. We heard East Rowan’s Jeff Safrit talk about the strain last week. We heard former West Rowan baseball coach Skip Kraft talk about how tough it was a year ago.
It’s not just the games — or even those practices that often run three hours for a head baseball coach if he works with both his jayvee and varsity teams.
“It’s become year-round now in the major sports,” says Fink, who began contemplating stepping down nearly a year ago. “Fall workouts, winter workouts, clinics. And I’ve always been out there, putting in the time. It hasn’t been a case where I’ve just made the field available.”
Add the hours together and they become days. The days become months. The months become years and before you know it your kids grow up without you. Fink’s seen it happen to others and he doesn’t want to be next in line.
Fink talks next about his classroom career. He’s taught for 12 years and wants to earn a masters degree in either math or administration.
“I’ve always had goals about what I wanted to do academically,” says Fink. “Going to school part-time, it will take me three years or so to get my masters and at that point, I’ll be looking at having 15 or 16 years in. If I don’t do it soon, it’s going to be pointless.”
Third, Fink doesn’t deny there’s been some frustration with what’s happened on the field at South in recent years.
“It’s taken its toll,” admits Fink, who has gone 20-47 the last three seasons, after posting a 39-15 mark his first two years. “What’s really hurt is that the past three years we’ve had great kids who have done everything we asked. We’ve worked even harder than those first two teams did and yet we’ve still struggled.”
There’s a reason. Coaches are important, but any coach worth his salt will tell you in a heartbeat that no one is smart enough to win without talented players.
Fink’s first two teams were talent rich.
“Almost too much talent,” says Fink, shaking his head at the memory of the ‘96 team that broke school records and breezed to a CPC title. “We had two all-conference pitchers (Clint Gryder and Chad Austin) and a third guy (Jonathan Mullis) who’d go out and throw no-hitters in the non-conference games.”
Hard-working kids kept coming into the South program after ‘97, but they weren’t as fast or as strong as people like Kevin Sides and Larry Ballard and Kevin Deal had been.
South’s recent lack of knockout talent has been compounded by the fact that it hasn’t had an ounce of luck for a long time. It lost a game to R.J. Reynolds this year on an unbelievable call on the last play of the game. It lost 9-8 in the regular season to CPCtournament champ Davie County and finally finished its frustrating season with a 7-6 loss to Mount Tabor in the CPC tournament.
Fink always took the losses hard — personally— as if he’d somehow let the kids down. Like he’d been the one who struck out with the tying run at third or made the two-out error.
Some people whisper that Fink wasn’t tough enough, but no one ever said he didn’t care about his players. It hurt him each spring when he had to make cuts, hurt him to watch kids have to sit the bench, hurt him to make out a lineup card minus the name of that kid who desperately wanted to be in there. That part of the job never got any easier, even after five years.
He was close to his players. They respected him. They also liked him.
“The relationships Ihad with the players, yeah, that’s the one thing I’ll miss most,” says Fink, who spoke to a number of his former charges at Sunday’s Legion game. “That’s why I’ll honestly miss practice more than games. I’ll always be able to come out to the field and enjoy a ballgame. But what will hurt is driving out of the parking lot after school and knowing the South Rowan baseball team is down there practicing. Practice is where you build relationships.”
But Fink says it’s time to leave that parking lot and not look back. He sat down the other day with his players and told them the news. Then he told principal Alan King that the timing was right, with two capable coaches (Greg Yanz and Linn Williams) still in the program and with good players like all-conference shortstop Ronnie Shore returning.
Fink looks back with satisfaction at those little things that transcend wins and losses. He helped a half-dozen kids whom no else believed in make good. He coached an amazing number of brother acts. He coached current Raider assistant Travis Billings when he was a jayvee. He coached at least 15 players who got the opportunity to play college ball.
“We did a lot of things the last five years that I’m proud of,” Fink says. “I was very fortunate to get the opportunity to coach at this high school.”
Fink was never fortunate, however, whenever awards were handed out.
In ‘96, when his team blew away everyone in the CPC, conference coach of the year honors for unexplained reasons went to the coach of runner-up Mount Tabor. That same year, Bill Kesler’s Cavaliers went 22-3 and the North veteran beat out Fink for county coach of the year. Then in ‘97, when Fink’s team returned to the state playoffs, Safrit’s East Rowan squad had an even better year. But Fink never complained about the lack of accolades. He always seemed to understand.
Fink will be remembered as a class guy who almost always kept his cool. I saw him get tossed out of a game just once, late in the ‘97 regular season against Davie County, when I was his assistant coach. That meant he had to sit out the next game, and I had to coach it, while he paced and prayed in the stands. I’ll never forget that when that game ended, he came up to me and said, “You did exactly what I would have done.”
Coming from him, that was the best compliment I’ve ever gotten.
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Mike London is the assistant sports editor of the Post.
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