By RYAN ARENA
L’Observateur

As a sportswriter here in the River Region, I’ve seen numerous coaches come and go: some by their own decision, others, not so much.

Whether or not I agree or disagree with those decisions, I haven’t been one to use this space to commentate on the “rightness” or “wrongness” of each one: we don’t know what goes on behind closed doors, and I realize  those making these decisions don’t have it easy. They want what’s best for their school, what’s best for their district, and that means making the tough call at times.

But in the case of now former East St. John football coach and athletic director Phillip Banko, I feel compelled to speak. And I believe he got a raw deal.

I don’t pretend to know whether Banko was the right man to eventually lead East St. John to the pinnacle, a state championship. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t.

Superintendent Kevin George, to his credit, doesn’t hide behind anyone else on this issue: he said he made the call to move on from Banko, and he has enough class to not air whatever criticisms he has of the coach publicly.

I believe George is doing what he feels is best for East St. John, what is necessary to get the school to the next level, to where the Destrehans and Hahnvilles of the world currently reside. I have little doubt his heart is in the right place.

But even if George is 100 percent correct in his assessment that ESJ needs a new voice to climb the ladder, I don’t think this was the right time to make that move. Because whether or not Banko was the right man to lead East St. John to a state championship, he was absolutely the right man to lead East St. John through Hurricane Isaac and its aftermath.

Banko preached family and togetherness to his team. He lived it, he breathed it. I know “talking the talk” in that regard makes for a pretty newspaper quote, but I know he believed it and his team bought in because of what I saw in the Isaac aftermath.

Just days after Isaac swept through our region, leaving many Wildcat players displaced from their homes, almost every player was in attendance at their first team meeting the Monday after the storm. His players bought in, completely.

When he took the ESJ job, he was moving into an office in a completely renovated fieldhouse, filled with brand new equipment. He’s spent the past three seasons, conversely, operating out of trailers at an abandoned elementary school campus, shuffling members of his 5A football team into and out of tiny workspaces and playing on a practice field nobody will ever confuse with those at the schools he’s primarily competing with.

At any point, he could have cut and run; this wasn’t the job he signed up for, after all. He stuck it out.

Despite those long odds, he entered each season with the same goal: for his team to be playing its best football by season’s end, in district play and in the postseason.

He prepared his team by playing one of the state’s toughest schedules, season in and season out.  Scheduling games against John Curtis, Scotlandville and Rummel in predistrict fare doesn’t get you a sparkling record, but it does harden a team for the stretch run.

The Wildcats played nine teams who qualified for the postseason this year. ESJ’s talent, yes, is better than a 6-6 finish; but so was Banko’s coaching. The schedule was brutal.

His final loss as Wildcats head coach will go down as an ugly 68-14 postseason defeat to Destrehan. It was a catastrophe on all levels: Destrehan started fast, then East St. John lost quarterback Xavier Lewis, who played most of the first half on one leg before stepping aside in the second half.

ESJ underperformed in that game. They overperformed two weeks prior in a 28-14 loss to that same DHS team. DHS was simply a better football team this season. And make no mistake, it will be difficult for any incoming head coach to consistently get the better of Destrehan and Hahnville; ESJ has Riverside and St. Charles Catholic to immediately contend with, with all three schools dividing the pool of quality local players.

George said through a statement released this week that he believes Banko to be a good man whom he has a great deal of respect for. He also said the district plans to have a new coach in place by the end of January.

The Superintendent is well within his rights to desire long playoff runs, for a string of nine, 10 or 11 win seasons.

I don’t think Banko was deserving of an Isaac pass forever, but I believe he should have been retained at least until he and his players were back at the ESJ campus. East St. John will need a great coach, indeed, to capture a state title within the next few years. It needed a good man and quality leader to guide it through the past three.

Whether Banko is the former can be debated. In my estimation, he was certainly the latter.