Miles Mann: Passing it forward
 Mann |
Throughout the season, Miles Mann and fellow junior football league coach Eric Wytovak pull the kids on their team aside, one by one, and give them The Talk.
“We tell them things are going to happen, good and bad,” Mann said. “Some friends will be good and some won’t. Some will ask them to do things that might not seem right, and when that time comes, they need to call someone they trust. If they don’t feel comfortable calling mom or dad – even if it’s 10 or 20 years later – they can call us.”
Mann, assistant director of Facility Operations, has coached in the junior football league for 10 years. It’s a talk that he received from his coaches, who included Mike Duckworth and Ronald D. Romain, a 1973 USI graduate and member of the USI Board of Trustees.
“I still see Mike Duckworth as an 18-year-old, trying to teach me at nine years old,” Mann said. “He told me, ‘If anybody asks you to drink or do drugs, you call me.’ I hope to have a positive effect on these kids the way my coaches had on me. And I’m sure that’s why Ron Romain, who played college baseball at USI, did it, because there might be a snot-nosed kid named Miles Mann he’s going to teach a life lesson to.”
Mann and his wife Andrea have three children. He coaches youngest son Scrappy, a third-grader at Corpus Christi, in basketball and did the same for Lindsay and Daniel (both at Mater Dei) in basketball, softball, and all the other sports they played.
In addition to coaching, Mann has umpired four high school baseball state championships and has been Indiana’s top-rated umpire for the last two years. The previous 15 years he was rated in the top 10.
Mann has taught a lot of kids over the years, but there is one he will never forget.
Hambone, a fourth-grader in the junior football league, couldn’t tie his shoes, but he wanted to play football, so he came to practice and tried hard.
“He wasn’t very good, but we worked with him every day,” Mann said. “He didn’t know how to run with a football. He didn’t know anything. We worked with him for three weeks on how to hold a football.”
Hambone’s moment came when his team was down by four points late in the game. “We put him out there to run the football. Every kid on our team knew that Hambone wasn’t going to be a football player. But on that play, every kid did what they had to do so that Hambone would score.”
Hambone made the winning touchdown.
“I can still picture him standing in the end zone. He’s got that football in his hands, and the referee just signaled that he scored a touchdown. He’s just looking around. He has no idea what he just did. But the other 10 kids on that play are jumping up and down, hugging him. The kids on the other team are jumping up and down. The referees are patting him on the back.”
Mann still gets choked up when he thinks about it. “I couldn’t look at the head coach because he was bawling, and as I looked on the sidelines every one of our parents was crying,” he said.
It was a moment Hambone, now in high school, still brags about.
“Fifty years from now, no matter what my win-loss record is as a coach, I’ll always remember that one day when Hambone scored that touchdown,” Mann said. “And that’s enough.”
Mann has been with USI for 20 years. He has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Evansville.
Wendy Knipe Bredhold
News & Information Services
812/461-5259 or wkbredhold@usi.edu
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