Pro-Doh

Posted March 28th, 2003 by Sean Williams

Matt Doherty may have lost his job, already. Matt is the young energetic and some say bi-polar coach of my team. He played with Jordan, Worthy, Perkins and more and won a championship at Carolina, and he has returned to pick up the mantle of the hardest job in amateur sports. They are leaving it up to the players to help make the decision whether or not to fire him.

I’m torn also because he lost a lot of games in a player revolt last year that probably was led by Joe Forte (who left the year before) who has become one of the shittiest people to ever graduate from Carolina (he was just suspended for cheering the other team when Seattle played Washington). Doherty lost one of his three key players, yet got five or six huge wins and ended the season one shy of twenty wins with a rag-tag group of Freshmen and Sophomores. He did all this while loving the school and dealing with rumors and attacks on all sides…

Wait a minute. I’m not torn at all. You want to let a group of 19 year olds decide policy for one of the most storied programs in the country? I wouldn’t let a group of 19 year olds have a say in what the next play Gideon Productions produces, why the hell would it matter that they think the coach is a jerk? Doherty’s players have consistently gotten better (Manuel and Scott basically came out of nowhere this year and Jawad was our team’s most consistent player) and it is impossible to know what a team gets from a coach when they are all underclassmen.

At the end of Jordana’s first year at Carolina, she sought a transfer. I jumped from school to school, I didn’t know anything until I turned thirty. Some kids think Doherty’s mean? Why isn’t it the football playing walk-on who’s complaining? Unless Coach smacked someone, then these kids should straighten up and tough it out. If you want to live your life playing a game, then you had better decide that it is worth an enormous amount of abuse and hard work.

My career is a game. As kids we pretended to be other people, now I do it for a living. And in order to do it, I have to face a lot of bullshit. Matt Doherty should change not one thing about what he is doing, and the staff at UNC should be ashamed of not standing behind him before. Unless he has done something criminal or is medically insane, I am ashamed of how my team has handled this.