Scott Vieth is a former Beacon editor in chief who has spent over 20 years as a collegiate athletics coach. He is currently the head men’s and women’s tennis coach at Wilkes University. 

Be a dog

There are plenty of differences between cats and dogs. We’ve all seen the memes and the cartoons. The dog barks while the cat sleeps. The dog eagerly wags its tail and sits at attention waiting for instruction while the cat knocks something off the piano just for spite and walks away.

Some people are dog people, some people are cat people, some people like both, and some don’t like either. 

Personal preference is fine. We like what we like. But when it comes to a team, the stereotypical characteristics of dogs are better than what we often see from our feline friends. 

Back in 2011, a football coach issued one of the all-time great viral internet clips on this exact subject. Former Coastal Carolina football coach David Bennett went off the deep end and nearly transformed himself into a cartoon when he talked about his frustration with “cats” in the locker room. Go back and watch it. It’s on YouTube. Just search “Coach Bennett Be A Dog.” 

I know that our current student-athletes were closer to kindergarten than college in 2011, but at that time in my career I was split in four different directions of the coaching world. I was coaching college football, college tennis, working as a college strength & conditioning coach and I was coaching little league baseball on the side. 

For about six months, whether it came from a football player, a tennis player, somebody in the weight room or a nine-year-old, I saw or heard about this video about a hundred times a day. It was everywhere.

Seriously. Go back and watch it. It will take you a minute to figure out what you just watched, and the negative attention that the football program received after the whole world laughed at Coach Bennett’s… umm…. Speech contributed to him and his staff losing their jobs. But, among all of the nonsensical sounds and gestures, Coach Bennett made a few good points.

The theme Coach Bennett was stressing was that he wanted players who were more concerned with helping their team win and less concerned with how they looked doing it. He wanted more players who looked forward to a challenge and fewer players who backed down from the challenge. 

He wanted players who were more likely to “bark” when something was wrong in their program and fewer players who were going to ignore the problem if it didn’t concern them.

I love all animals. Cats, dogs, horses, fish, birds, salamanders…whatever. I think they’re all pretty cool in their own way. 

But when it comes to teams, I think Coach Bennett was on to something. We need more dogs. 

Coaches, do you have valuable insights to share? Contact the sports editor, Andrew Marshallsay to get featured in future editions of The Beacon.