Notes on the Student Film ‘The Coach’ – Stephan Crown-Weber

September 16, 2025

Coach appears in scene one, shot one—every breath hissing from his windpipe. Seen from behind, his tummy pours out of a semi-ergonomic chair in the school’s colors, red and black, faded, as though overlaundered in unlike colors. Truly a case of Dunlop Disease, he says perhaps once a week from a mouth beneath what is beginning to resemble a brown tonsure. (You get once more that his belly done lops.) “I’m ready for this broadcast to get rolling. You know’w’mean?” Coach is then expounding on growing up in Southern Indiana or something. He is insisting, fluorescent light making his skin glow pink all of a sudden in this camcorder’s idiom, that they used to plant tomatoes in pairs of boys and girls. The boy presses down with the shovel, the girl pops in the starter. “Tisn’t a task for for the delicate thespian.” His voice is mid-Atlantic, commercial break Shakespearean. He winks at the director.

Coach proceeds to wobble between possible accents. The filmmaker clears her throat, a harrumph that seems to be based on the premise that a mere ahem is not quite to the level of the TV heights. Giddy chuckling bursts both sides of Coach as she states that they can begin. Coach says in what he calls a final aside that the harrumph belongs to the Greats and it may someday be inherited by everyone there.

“Waylp,” Coach says. “I reckon it’s tam for us to high tail outta here and go to the woods.” He is present, more so than the kids on his team can hope.

“Yes, that would be a great idea,” the little one, Sasha says. These are not her lines. She has no lines but she is in a movie on the occasion of the director secretly wanting to do something funny before she graduates. Coach has received the situation from the director, too, though he apparently does not know it either.

There is a little conference after the officially sanctioned performance, where the director holding the camera comes at Sasha with the quip that she claims to be enthusiastic yet sounds like a baby doll with a string. Sasha retorts that different people are different and shrugs. “I was trained for the stage. We project.”

The director, being just a teen, relents, and then stews alone. For a second, Sasha’s eyebrows arch and it would seem the countersass hasn’t ended—but this could be genuine art.

It is the same problem with everyone on the team, most of them. They have normal voices. They seem believably themselves. And then they begin to perform and turn on acting voice. There is a deadpan that they all know to be wrong: ultranerdy sounding, or something like that. The scene and the next are ruined if not for the fact that in theory Sasha could be faking it, has this half-eager drone.

The director breaks herself from this funk and has asked for enthusiasm, and Sasha now gets louder. It makes little sense, but the personal niche the director is consulting has gotten used to it almost. One doesn’t do one’s best work when one is seventeen, Coach says during a break. He gestured over in the direction of Sasha and Clint. Clint is holding Sasha’s hand. “Ahhh…to be young.” And then tells them to break it up.

The director zooms in behind their backs, a red-headed Clint and red-headed Sasha who together seem to be a sign. It would have been that she thought: Neither Clint nor Sasha, in the director’s estimation, is that attractive or cool.

In the next scene, Clint is summoning the countriest accent he can find. He is searching the voice of his uncle, who he at one point months ago said once chanted: home-cooked sausage and we’re all down on the farm! His uncle was from Ohio, not a hillbilly. Nowhere close to being able to pretend that the Irish and German stock he is from had these concepts or had a clue about that e that sounds like an ay. He is absorbed in the thought of a hillbilly. Either that the hillbilly that he is is coiled, ready.

+++++

Now the film is on the lookout point outside town. Immensity. A shot of the black and white highway. The black and white sky. Starlings tinkling like keys in a tree. It is a mercy that their song from a ways down the road is not overlaying the footage of the conversation proper because the cuts between shots will be too jarring. A starling chorus would have been too discontinuous. Two streetwise women confer with a husky softball-teamness situated perhaps deep in the throat. They are both drinking from immense BPA-free water bottles, wiping their mouths in black and red letter jackets.

“Whadda you know about coach?” Toni asks.

“I said what I said,” E tells her.

“You remember what coach always used to say.”

E looks away, miffed. “Let’s not talk about coach.”

“Coach doesn’t want to. Coach hates us.”

“Coach always said I could be somebody.”

“Coach was a wise one—is one. The softball team says folks screwed up big time with the scheme.”

“Did they know? About the arrest?”

“Coach knew.”

The director allows herself to believe the bloodbeat along with the immensity of Coach surrounded by woods as though this is the outcome of the largeness and very act of teaching with which he has consoled himself. It is very nearly correct to call Coach a fallen First Responder in the sober tone of the era.

++++

The director’s disdain for Sasha wells up now that she is shooting her again, perhaps the next week. The director can hear the director’s own accent: she can hear her dad’s voice from New York.

It somehow seems impossible to explain why Sasha’s voice sounds sillier than ever—aside from Sasha deciding there is an internal arc to her voice throughout the little movie—there is of course the logic whereby Coach himself cannot play favorites and would not knowingly appear in one student movie over another such that he would be obligated to appear in multiple student movies—such that Sasha is taking advantage of her—if the recollection is correct that Sasha understands this could be a film or Sasha is an unwitting participant at this stage.

This isn’t you, the director says, again under the guise of training her for her broadcasting routine. You don’t sound like that. Sasha disagrees and the moment comes when the director leans in on the theory that if she enrages Sasha, she will get better output.

She is recording in her pocket and angles in close to Sasha for a moment because she cannot film her and expect cooperation: “We should just hang out for a second. What will you do when you go off to school and Clint is still here?”

“He’ll go to the same college as me. We’ve figured it out. Or we’ll be close to each other.”

+++

As for coach:

The forest claims him in the next scene onward. Maybe we are supposed to believe that he was the softball coach in another world. The director has not tried to explain this to the real coach. The words got jumbled. And she fell silent with the thought that the Greats just do weird things in movies sometimes. A forest that is none other than trees behind the high school, maybe as he goes to his car in the late afternoon. Infinitely far from anywhere that can help him. The lights flicker. The footage shifts to black and white. Then sepia. A closeup of an oak trunk. Mature. A stand of maples. Seen from afar.

In a voice-over Coach shouts: “Is anybody out there? Hello…hello…” There is laughter mixed in from the moment he said this in class.

We see the noose drop from the moment before the camcorder was activated. Coach is not tied up. The cacophony of misbowed b-roll strings amps up. He covers his ears. The same birds again. A different shot from the lookout of the starlings rattling like keys. He is on the ground.

++++

They are having their speech team drama club party to celebrate the fictional Coach’s death in an ostensibly increasingly non-secret film cohering around a camcorder. The tough softballing ladies are notably absent. It is being theorized that the invitation extended to them was not direct enough—or is it fair to say that they were not insistent and they have escaped into the role? After their time on the bluff, somehow it seems all too clear that they might have been unleashed upon other cities.

The director is zooming in on Clint and Sasha, who have retreated to the back of one of those deluxe backyards that this main avenue into town contains.

They are whooping. She is zooming. The camera can barely handle it. Image stabilization is an issue. The screen catches the pair, then is lagging, then catches up.

“We need to kill them,” the director says. “This cult we’re in that claimed Coach Stulls for the forest would do the same.”

And so they say they will circle them, raise their fists, hold up a campaign sign that says: “Top Ten City. We did it all without alcohol.”

They say they will let them go. There is a gaggle of boys around the director, all of them within weeks of graduation. She can feel their breath burn—with the unearthly twist that they are pretending to be gay or women or whatever other relevant subcategories they understand exist among those they understand to be otherwise fragile or prone to frivolity.

We all perhaps should know what is going on as the boys share nips of a bottle of Coke and the director laughs and laughs at them disapprovingly—until one of the boys, bulky enough for football but terminally unmotivated, attracted to non-scholastic rounds of golf and whatever semblance of a golf team there is as well as afternoon cigars, puts his face in the camera. “Let’s kill them now.”

The camera is trained on the two of them, Clint with his arm around Sasha. In the failing evening light, they are granulated and almost gray, the camera imposing a layer of sandiness over a landscape dominated by the almost-yellow security lights in the adjoining yard a thousand feet away from them on a parallel street.

Sasha says: “Was it something I said? This is your party. I’m outta here.”

“This is when we kill them.”

“No. No. Not so fast. Is it possible we’re all good enough?” the director asks.

And maybe finally Sasha and Clint begin to act. Finally a halfway genuine scream from a girl in love with the ritual of reminding someone that they have seen this particular signal of judgment before. And she does not begin to demand to turn off the camera as she blubbers, long enough for her to cover her eyes with dormer shutter hands and moan before she shifts into a baby talk of wanting her phone-phone and sippy juice.

The director will admit while hanging out with the boys above the lake a few hours later that this is the moment at which it has become obvious that Sasha can only be resisting art because art is being made.