Couch: Grand Ledge's Nolan Bird learns joys, perils of playing for Dad

GRAND LEDGE – Nolan Bird can still recite every word of the tongue-lashing his father gave him last summer in front of his Grand Ledge teammates.

Matt Bird remembers his son’s shoulders slumping and, in that moment,  suddenly seeing his starting quarterback simply as the vulnerable child he once was.

“At that point, he was that 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that every dad sees their son as their whole lives,” Matt said. “And that hurts.”

That emotionally jarring experience — at a seven-on-seven camp at Grand Valley State University before last season — served as a valuable lesson to father and son, coach and quarterback.

Nolan begins his second season as a Grand Ledge’s starting quarterback tonight at Hudsonville, ahead of home games against DeWitt and Sexton the next two weeks.

He’s a junior now, a wise, savvy 16-year-old.

“I was a young kid,” Nolan explained of his behavior that led to his father’s public scolding. “I didn’t know how to deal with adversity.”

Time moves slow when you’re in high school. Years feel like years instead of yesterday. And to be fair, there often is a real difference in maturity between a 15-year-old sophomore and a 16-year-old junior.

Playing quarterback for Dad comes with wonderful perks and cherished lifelong memories, but also tremendous pressures and uncomfortable relationship dynamics.

When Nolan became Grand Ledge’s starting quarterback before last season, he was a coach’s kid and sophomore on a senior-laden team.

Matt knew Nolan would face a different type of pressure than other kids — a sense confirmed when he bumped into Pat O’Keefe Jr., who had also played for his father at Grand Ledge many years earlier.

“He said, ‘Never underestimate the pressure that it exists when you’re carrying the last name in that building,’” Matt said. “And he had it better than anybody.

“We try to separate as best we can, but we do talk about it a little bit, just understanding people are going to say things because of it. You’re just always under a microscope, which is tough when you’re 15, 16 years old.”

In the middle of practice before the first game of last season, Matt gathered his talented group of senior receivers around Nolan.

“Nolan was out of his comfort zone — playing up, a sophomore quarterback, his dad is the coach,” one of those receivers, Malek Adams, said. “He asked if we trusted Nolan being quarterback.”

Two of them said they did. One was hesitant. “Not really,” Nolan recalls his now good friend Luke LaLumia saying.

“It was difficult because I didn’t really know what the guys thought of me,” Nolan said. “It was like, ‘I know where they stand. I’ve got to slow my mind down and play my role.’”

This might have been the case for any sophomore in that situation. But the decision to elevate Nolan to full-time varsity starter was less clear in Matt’s mind because he was his son. The thought process was garbled by Matt’s fears of perceived favoritism.

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Nolan was the clear choice, the team’s only true quarterback. His ascent to the starting role had, in part, been a team decision, made with the help of senior captains who had given Matt their blessing and promised to shield Nolan from any added pressures as best they could.

“That was pretty awesome to hear from a coaching standpoint,” Matt said. “And also from a father standpoint, that guys were taking him under (their) wing.”

For all the tricky team dynamics, there can be wonderful advantages to playing for the man who raised you. In Nolan’s case, he’s spent his life around the sport in a football-crazed house, around Grand Ledge football and around his father’s offense.

“What you don’t realize is how much they pick up,” Matt said. “By the time you get a kid who’s a senior, you get non-verbal communication. With him, we had non-verbal by his sophomore year.”

“When we’re on offense in a tight ball game, it’s fun when we think alike,” Nolan said. “That’s when we really click. There’s almost no (verbal) communication.”

Which, for awhile, was best. Because addressing his father as “Dad” didn’t feel right around his teammates. “Coach” didn’t fit, either. That’s changed as Nolan’s become more comfortable.

“It’s always ‘Dad,’” Nolan said. “It would feel weird saying, ‘Coach.’ He’s my dad, and he’s my dad wherever I go.”

The Birds aren’t the first in this area to tackle this sometimes uncomfortable circumstance. Jarrett VanHavel played quarterback for his father, Jerry, the last four years at Mason High School.

“Personally, I was conscious of it in every decision we made,” Jerry said. “There were times in our coaches meetings I would say, ‘I don’t want to do that, I just don’t feel it would be the thing to do right now.’ And our other coaches would go, ‘Yeah, Jerry, we’re going to do this.’

“I thought it would appear if it was because he’s my kid. So the conscious thought about each decision I made never left. That was on my mind all the time.”

Like the Birds, Jerry remembers the tongue-lashings, which were usually harsher for Jarrett than for other players.

“It’s one thing when it comes from your coach. It’s another thing when it comes from your coach and your dad at the same time,” Jerry said. “I ripped him bad. It made me stop and think. I went back in the office and told the coaches, ‘I think I got on him too hard.’”

The joys far outweighed the headaches, Jerry said. Jarrett, now a freshman at Division-III power Mount Union, feels the same.

“The first couple years, it was hard to separate personal (conversations) from coaching, (to the point) where I’d be upset on the way home,” Jarrett said. “But toward the end, I was able to separate the two, and it made it a lot easier.

“I really enjoyed the fact that I had so much time spent with my dad. I had every single day after school for three to four hours spent with my dad. That was really nice. Just the memories I’ll have about high school football are always connected to my father.”

Jerry had been told by a colleague in a similar situation that he found it best to never take the football coaching home with him, to avoid blending the two roles. That didn’t work for Jerry and Jarrett.

In the case of the Birds, football is life in their household — that includes Matt’s wife and two daughters — though Matt tries not to bring practice into the house.

“He never brings up (Grand Ledge) football at home,” Nolan said. “I’m always the one who brings it up, because I want to understand what he’s saying.”

After last season, Nolan admitted to his parents, “Wow, that was kind of a lot.”

“Nolan is very quiet,” his mother Jamie said. “He’s one we have to really pull to get what he’s thinking and feeling out of him. He’s always been that way.

“Nolan did have to learn how to address his dad — ‘I can’t address him the same way when players are around, and I can talk to him differently at home.’ That was probably the biggest hurdle.

“To say, ‘No, you’re not making any sense,’ you can’t say that on the field. You can say that at home. On the field, you have to put it in a more respectful way.”

That was what led to the tongue-lashing at Grand Valley last year.

“We called a play, and it didn’t work,” Nolan said. “And I didn’t know why he called it. So I came off and he was trying to talk to me and I was saying things, ‘Why’d you call that?’ He kept trying to explain it, and I wouldn’t let him.”

Nolan knew he made a mistake the moment he turned his back on his father.

After the verbal undressing, the two took separate cars home, Nolan riding with Jamie.

“That’s when you go into father mode on the way home, and you’re going, ‘Man, I really crushed him, I know I did and I’ve got to do some things to build him up,’” Matt said.

It was a turning point in how the seniors on Grand Ledge’s team saw Nolan — they knew then he cared. And a turning point in how Matt and Nolan deal with each other on the field.

And, for Matt, a lesson that he uses with other players.

“It makes me realize how many kids go home with stuff I don’t see,” Matt said.

The others at least can get away from him for a while.

Nolan and Matt haven’t had another blowup since Grand Valley. It was probably necessary once. Probably good it happened when it did.

On the way home that day, Nolan texted his father: “Dad, I just don’t want to let these guys down.”

“Really, I knew what it was is the pressure of, he didn’t want to let me down,” Matt said.

“One piece of advice I got from Ryan Cubit (who played for his father at Western Michigan), ‘Every once in a while let him know you’re proud of him just because.’ We had a tough practice the other day, and he was frustrated, and I said, ‘You know what, Bud, I love watching you throw a football.’ Just let him understand you don’t have to be perfect.”

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.