Cruch Character Analysis

By displaying two types of coaches, Crutcher demands accountability from those responsible for leading sports teams. Coach Benson and Coach Roundtree are displayed negatively because their coaching styles are based on yelling and humiliation. Meanwhile, Coach Simet and Icko display compassion in their coaching. Simet repeats the sentiment “I’ve never coached a team like this before. There isn’t a kid out there who doesn’t deserve a letter” (211) several times over the course of Whale Talk. The Mermen aren’t the most competitively successful team, but that doesn’t matter to Simet. Contrarily, all Coach Benson seems to care about is competitive success and upholding the high standards of Cutter High School athletics through the symbol of the

letter jacket. He’s a one-sided character.

Like Mike Barbour and his cardboard cronies, Crutcher spends more time developing the attitudes, coaching abilities, and characters of those who display compassion and understand towards their students. Coach Simet and Icko lead their swim team with an integrity that Crutcher uses to demand accountability from those leading high school sports teams. Coaches need to focus on their athletes as students and as people. Simet directly confronts Benson about his coaching style during a phone call. Benson is yelling and Simet says, “Coach, that may or may not be a good coaching technique, but it doesn’t work with peers, okay?” (248). Simet calls Bensons practices into question, causing his own coaching style to stand out as more purposeful and compassionate. The swim team provides a model of a functional athlete-coach relationship that can be used to reframe the role coaches play to their teams, being accountable by focusing on athletes as students and people

first.
Moving past teams themselves, Cutter High School Athletes are supported by the toxic infrastructure of the Athletic Council and Wolverines Too.

The Athletic Council governs athletics at Cutter High School. The council is composed of coaches for each sport as well as a male and a female representative. This council builds up traditional sports such as football and basketball, while seeming to sabotage the swimming team. Benson tells T.J., “You don’t want to be putting the Athletic Council through all this and then come up empty” (189-190), directly positioning the council against the Mermen. Furthermore, the council holds a vote concerning the letter requirements of the swim team without Coach Simet present. As a group ruled by Coach Benson, flanked by Mike Barbour, they work to uphold the traditional sport culture rather than supporting all athletics. Furthermore, Wolverines Too, an alumni organization, follows the same trend as the Athletic Council. When the team leaves for the state swim meet, T.J says about their sendoff, “surprise!—no one from Wolverines Too, which was out en force when the football team boarded the bus for state” (242). The organization is biased in who they support. Additionally, the most prominent member of Wolverines Too is Rich Marshall, a former sports star at Cutter High School. Marshall is openly aggressive towards T.J. on multiple instances. For example, after T.J. spends time with Marshall’s step-daughter Heidi at a therapy session, T.J says,

“every time I ran into him at school the next day, he squinted one eye as if he was lining me up in crosshairs, and then turned away” (106). After more escalation, Alicia, Rich Marshall’s wife, tells T.J., “you need to know he really hates you” (216). Marshall is ultimately responsible for killing T.J.’s dad at the end of Whale Talk. Rich Marshall is granted far more real-estate in the story than Wolverines Too is. However, with Rich at the helm, the group is positioned as a bastion for toxicity that helps breed a never-ending cycle of problematic athletes and athletic practices at Cutter.