Wade Baker, 30, is Sports Editor of The Monitor. He graduated from Francis Marion University in Florence, S.C. in 2000 with a degree in Mass Communications and moved to the Rio Grande Valley in 2002 for a sports reporter opening at The Monitor. Baker was promoted to his current position in August of 2007 after serving as assistant sports editor for two years. 
Baker: My take on McHi’s Arney pulling his players
February 4th, 2008, 6:36 pm · 1 Comment · posted by wbaker
If you have been following The Monitor this weekend, you saw this story where McAllen High girls soccer coach Pat Arney yanked his team off the field and into the school bus minutes into Saturday’s championship match of the Dog Pound Invitational. It is one of the more odd coaching stories I have come across since I’ve been here in the Valley (well, not counting the Dave Evans and Tom Chavez sagas with Donna ISD).
If you haven’t seen it, check out this video below of Arney’s incident.
Now, Arney did profusely apologize for his actions in the article on Saturday. He was then suspended for Monday’s match, but the school district confirmed Tuesday in this article that Arney would return to the field in time for the Lady Bulldogs’ match Friday.
Now, as always, I’m going to offer my two cents, or three — or maybe even a dollar’s worth. I’ve met Arney face-to-face several times. I’ve done a story or two on his soccer teams at McHi. I have even fielded a 20-minute phone conversation one night on deadline where he verbally trashed our entire sports staff for not covering high school soccer more. And, believe me, he ripped our staff pretty good. But, with all that said, I think Arney is a good guy. I mean, he’s calling us for a reason. He wants his team covered. But this time he may have bitten off more coverage than he can chew.
What he did Saturday, it just wasn’t right. Because calls weren’t going his way, he pulled his team off the field. In this case, he was 100 percent wrong. What these kids should have been taught was despite the odds, despite how bad it gets, you never quit. That, my friends, is how you deal with everyday life. And everyone will find out one day that life has the tendency to throw you some wicked curveballs. What these kids need to know is that no matter how ugly it gets, you should never throw in the towell.
A fellow colleague asked me earlier in the office if I thought the one-game suspension is enough. To be honest, I don’t think it is — mainly for the reason mentioned above.
In my phone conversation that night with Arney, he asked me why we covered high school football so much more than high school soccer. He asked what the difference was. Well, I give you this. If a football coach had done what Arney did — had his team quit after a few too many yellow flags — I don’t think that football coach would have his job come Monday morning. That’s the difference between football and soccer in this state.
But, regardless, when you have a coach that takes his team of 15 or so 14- to 18-year-old athletes and tells them to quit, that’s wrong. I’m not saying Arney should be fired — because I really don’t think it’s necessary with his spotless track record — but something more should be done than just giving him a harmless one-game suspension.
February 11th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
What Arney did was ill-advised, at best. However, you shouldn’t excuse your sub-par, scanty coverage of any sport not football with this cop-out:
“In my phone conversation that night with Arney, he asked me why we covered high school football so much more than high school soccer. He asked what the difference was. Well, I give you this. If a football coach had done what Arney did — had his team quit after a few too many yellow flags — I don’t think that football coach would have his job come Monday morning. That’s the difference between football and soccer in this state.”
The reason why you don’t cover soccer with the same drooling exhausiveness you do football? The coaches aren’t penalized as much for infractions, you say. Well, congratulations. You’ve proven that you’re no better than he is in unfairly punishing players and their fans. Your pathetic, often inaccurate reporting has made it impossible to follow girls’ soccer, among other sports, and has denied hard-working athletes some richly-deserved recognition. Instead of asking yourself whether the measures taken to discipline Coach Arney were punitive enough (which, frankly, you don’t have control over), how about asking yourself why the blurb on Coach Arney was the only story on the San Benito Tournament available on rgvsports.com? God, give me a break.