Chance lost to teach a valuable lesson

The Pine-Eagle School Board recently had a chance, as the cliche goes, to send a message to the district's students in general, and to the boys basketball team at Pine-Eagle High in particular.

The board sent a message all right.

The wrong message.

By voting on Jan. 14 to allow head boys basketball coach Jeremiah Sprague, who on Jan. 9 pleaded guilty to stealing $50,000 from his great-aunt, to continue coaching, the board implied that what happens inside a courtroom needn't interfere with what happens on the court.

The board's chairperson, Marilyn Peterson, said that although board members "do not condone the action and regret the impact Jeremiah's actions have had on his reputation and position in our community, we believe Jeremiah is doing a good job as coach of the basketball team and think that removing him now would be a great disruption to the team."

Firing Sprague certainly would disrupt things.

Which is precisely why the board should have fired him.

Sprague's players are old enough and mature enough to adjust to a new coach. More to the point, they would have learned a far more valuable lesson from losing their coach than from keeping him.

They would learn, for instance, that when you commit a felony, as Sprague did, you lose some of the privileges our society affords to people who don't break the law.

We're not suggesting that Sprague is getting off easy.

He will serve 30 days in jail and three years' probation. He must perform 50 hours of community service. He must repay $50,000 to his great-aunt's estate.

And yet, the part of Sprague's life that his players know most about — his role as coach — continues without interruption, just as it would have had he never committed a crime.

People who know Sprague say he is a fine coach and a great mentor for his group of teenage athletes. We have no reason to doubt that such sentiments are accurate.

But if those opinions truly represent Sprague's character, then we hope that he has told his players the truth about what he did, and without sparing them any of the unpleasant details.

We hope Sprague has gone even further, though, and explained to his players that when a person makes a bad decision, as Sprague did, he should expect that he'll lose things which he treasures — his freedom, his money, his reputation. Sometimes even his job.

And we hope Sprague has apologized to his players, and told them he let them down.

And yet, no matter what Sprague has told or will tell his team, the players will know that, though their coach paid a high price for his crime, his job wasn't part of the tab.

And that's a pity, because those kids could have learned something from Sprague that's infinitely more important than the proper way to put on a full-court press.