SMU’s women’s basketball coach Rhonda Rompola has retired from coaching at the age of 55 after spending 35 years at the school as a player and coach. She claimed the main reason behind her retirement is a desire spend more time with her husband, but that on its own would be too simple. This is SMU after all.
In an interview with the AP, Rompola claimed that students weren’t as coachable in this day and age, and blamed an entitlement mentality.
“Kids are not as coachable as they were years ago,” she said. “I see kids sometimes talking back to their coaches and it’s like a way of life. I’m just being honest. The rules and everything they get, they haven’t taken time to appreciate. I was happy to have a scholarship. Kids nowadays are more concerned about when their next cost-of-attendance check is. It’s just a different world.”
Damn millennials with their iPhones and their Snapchat, they just don’t appreciate the hard it works it take to be an indentured servant to the NCAA’s “amateur athletics” scheme!
Rompola is really not a fan of the new cost-of-attendance initiatives by schools in order to help give student-athletes the benefits they need to not have to live on 12 cent ramen and Spam despite how much these athletes are making for their schools.
“Kids are making decisions these days to go to a college based on what their cost-of-attendance check is, based on the meals they get, not based on academics, not based on what a great school it is,” she said. “I just think the direction it’s going is they are making (decisions) for the wrong reasons.”
This is no doubt true, but since the NCAA doesn’t provide anything else to their student-athletes besides the bare necessities to live a life where a student athlete can perform up to their capabilities, why wouldn’t they consider that above academics? As Cardale Jones said, “I ain’t here to play school”.
Rompola may stay involved with basketball by coaching young kids, but she won’t take another full-time job now that she’s retired. She also wants to spend some quality time golfing, because that’s what retired coaches do.
“Maybe I’m old school,” she said. “It’s not necessarily what I signed up for and I’m not going to adjust my coaching to the way kids are these days. That’s how it is these days, coaches having to adjust to kids, rather than kids having to adjust to coaches.”
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Maybe someone will tweet about that too.
[AP]
