Opinion corner: Grass not always greener

Talk about it

Calls or emails from coaches this time of year make me a little nervous.

Not in a negative way, but if a coach gets a new job and is going to leave, usually it’s sometime in the spring or early summer.

If I was an athletic director at a Division II or big-time NAIA college and needed a basketball, baseball, volleyball or any other kind of coach, I’d be sniffing around Jamestown College.

Coaching is one of those professions where you can really like your job, your boss, your everything, but if you get that call, well …

I think I know many of the coaches at Jamestown College pretty well — I couldn’t name one I don’t like — and they’re also good at what they do as winning the final Dakota Athletic Conference Commissioner’s Cup indicates.

But they’re not unlike anybody else. When a perceived better opportunity arises you have to look at it. But it was interesting Tuesday when a story popped up on the wire called Marion-Lickliter.

Covering the NAIA as long as I have I know Marion (Ind.) is an NAIA school. Being a college basketball dork like I am, I know Todd Lickliter is the former head coach at Butler — the school that advanced to the NCAA title game in 2010 and ’11 — but then left for Iowa where he promptly crashed and burned and was canned three years and a 38-57 record later.

Thad Matta, now the basketball boss at Ohio State, is generally considered the guy that got the Butler ball rolling, but Lickliter certainly didn’t do anything to slow it down. He won 131 of 192 games, but in 2007 jumped for the head job at Iowa, which did not work out.

So after a year off and one as an assistant, Lickliter was hired as the head coach at NAIA Marion University on Tuesday. Undoubtedly, Lickliter views the job as a stepping stone to something bigger.

Would Lickliter have taken Butler to where they are now? Hard to say, but what can’t be denied is that it’s further proof of one of the world’s greatest axioms that the grass is not always greener.

Of course, Lickliter was paid $6 million for his three failed years at Iowa so what the heck do I know?

Sun sports editor Dave Selvig can be reached at (701) 952-8460 or by e-mail at dselvig@jamestownsun.com

Tags: sports, coaching, jimmies