FeedsGreat Salowich
New Salem coach hopes to feed hunger to win
Parker Salowich is a man of many of talents.
To name a few: he teaches English and can quote both Woody Hayes and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the same conversation. More impressively, he’s in the process of trying to rebuild a struggling Salem High School football program as the new varsity head coach.
It could be a challenge, but the 35-year-old is up to it. He has the experience and the attitude.
In high school he played football for the now defunct Southgate Aquinas. He started coaching while he attended classes at Eastern Michigan University, where he earned a degree in English.
He coached for places like South Lyon and Southgate Anderson before spending the last two years as the offensive coordinator and assistant head coach at North Farmington, where he still teaches English.
Ideally he would love to teach at Salem.
“I love it at North—it’s a great school, with wonderful kids and great parents and administration,” he said. “But I think for a program to be a top-notch, superior program the coach needs to be in the building, if for nothing else, just to help with the day-to-day stuff with the kids. At least they get to see you.
“It’s a unique situation here, though,” he said. “There are 6,400 kids between the three schools. Who knows what kind of interaction I would have anyway.”
After graduating EMU with an English degree, he bounced around in the sales field for about eight years. Then life happened. He got married and decided he needed something a little more stable. So he went back to school in 2000 for his teaching certification.
His first teaching gig was substitute-teaching business for a semester at Dearborn Fordson High School. After that, he hired in at Belleville to teach middle school. Then North Farmington came calling the following fall and he couldn’t pass it up.
Salowich has been around a lot of different schools and teams but said he gained the most experience at his first coaching job in South Lyon. He spent three years as the freshman, junior varsity coach and helped out with scouting.
“I learned a lot about football there,” he said. “I watched a ton of film in those days; that’s where I got my appreciation for scouting. I just hung around the staff, learning a lot about football and watching how they coach and what they look for and grade film and scout opponents. That kind of made me think that I wanted to be a football coach.”
After a pretty good season (7-3) with North Farmington last year he heard about the Salem job in January and applied for it right away. On the last day of March he received a call for the athletic office congratulating him.
He replaced Bob Cummings, who still teaches physical education along with some of the other former coaches. Under what would normally be uncomfortable circumstances, Salowich said there has been no animosity between the new and the old staff.
“(Cummings) has been nothing but helpful and gracious,” Salowich said. “I think, and I don’t know if it’s because he went to school here, that he hopes for success for us. It takes a big person to do that. He could have very easily just said ‘I’m not helping—I don’t want any part of this,’ but instead he wants to see this program be successful.”
The day he was hired was a big day all around. Three hours after he got the coaching job, his second child was born, Charles Fitzgerald—Fitzgerald because his favorite book is The Great Gatsby.
It’s no wonder. Salowich, like Gatsby, is full of dreams, life, passion and love. He’s not in love with a girl named Daisy but rather the game of football. He hopes he’s hired a staff that feels the same way.
“We have great enthusiasm,” he said. “We hired a really good staff. The guys are positive motivators and have a genuine passion for the game and that’s something that I kind of got the sense that the kids didn’t really have that.”
Salowich takes coaching beyond the gridiron, though.
“It’s important for the kids to realize that football is bigger than the nine Friday nights you play in your senior year,” he said. “Our staff, and what I’m trying to do, is mold these guys into being good citizens and good young men that are going to go on and become good fathers and good husbands and people that contribute to society. I know it sounds like a grandiose objective, but that’s what we want to do—help make good kids—and everybody’s on board with that.”
Of the 11-man staff, two are police officers and the rest are teachers, retired teachers or student teachers.
“Everyone is in that educational mode as far as being a part of kids’ lives,” he said. “So our guys are teachers on the field as well as just coaches.”
Being around the students is his favorite part of the job—it keeps him young.
“Gatsby said, ‘Can’t relive the past; why of course you can,” he said then exaggerated Gatsby’s chuckle, “Ha, ha, ha.”
“This is how I explain it to the kids: You guys are always 17; now I’m 35 and will be 36 but you will always be 17. There’s that time-in-a-bottle aspect of teaching and coaching where there will always be a new crop of seniors—always that new crop of 17-year old wide-eyed kids that just want to be coached. So I never get older.”
There is little room for error in a bone-crushing conference that contains juggernauts and cross-campus rivals Canton and Plymouth, but Salowich isn’t too concerned.
“We’re going to be prepared and nobody will out work us,” he said. “Woody Hayes said, ‘if you give me a big enough head start, I’ll beat Jesse Holmes in a 40-yard dash.’
“The idea is: if I work hard enough that’s my advantage and I’m going to take that advantage and I’m going to try and win,” he explained. “So we are burning the midnight oil as far as the coaching staff is concerned. We are really trying to be ready and prepared.”
Although school administrators, parents, the community, competing coaches and the media will be scrutinizing Salowich this first year (and probably longer), he said his biggest critic will be himself.
“I am hardest on myself than anyone else,” he said. “Unfortunately, I am a perfectionist and there’s no such thing, probably. But that’s that green light at the end of Daisy’s dock (another Gatsby reference) that I keep looking for—It’s that elusive pursuit of excellence.”
He and his staff are still defining roles with the players before practices start on Aug. 7 but the anticipation to start the season is building among the coaches and athletes.
“We’re really excited,” he said. “There’s definitely a hunger and an eagerness to get out and play football. They’re wonderful kids that are fun to be around. We just have to keep that going and build on it.”
Gatsby was “great” because he had a way of transforming his dreams into reality. Can Salowich do the same? Will Salem hail him as the Great Salowich?
Those are questions that will have to be answered on the gridiron come the end of August. As Gatsby might say: good luck, “old sport.”
