Staff Writer
This story was corrected on Sept. 22. An explanation of the correction is at the bottom of the story.
Howard Putterman was having a rough evening. His girls soccer team had just allowed three goals in the game’s first 15 minutes and lost, 4-0.
Weary and dejected, the Tuscarora High School teacher walked into the building to wash up. Allison Yard was the first to spot him.
“Coach, you look like you could use a hug,” she said on that night two years ago.
Putterman was never her coach.
Although Putterman teaches sophomore biology at Tuscarora, he coaches girls soccer at Linganore. Yard was a player for the Titans, who had just beaten Putterman’s Lancers.
Yard was once Putterman’s teaching aide and had never called him “coach.” It was always “Mr. Putterman” or occasionally the less-formal “Putty.”
That’s just how the line blurs for Putterman in the fall; come springtime, he coaches Linganore’s girls tennis team. But no matter his title at any particular moment, Putterman connects players and students, even when the latter are his opponents.
As Yard’s offer of embrace showed, his pupils don’t get caught up in the distinctions.
“That was really sweet,” said Putterman, who is in his sixth year teaching at Tuscarora and his fourth year coaching at Linganore. “She made my night. I appreciated that more than she’ll ever know.”
There is a downside to Putterman’s arrangement: Teaching and coaching at different schools sometimes keeps him from his players. He was in the school that night only because he didn’t take the team bus back to Linganore.
When Putterman began coaching for the Lancers, he said some parents were concerned he didn’t he didn’t work at the school.
He had similar reservations; Putterman said he initally hoped for a coaching opening at Tuscarora, even though he knew Titans soccer coach Mark Wolcott wasn’t leaving.
He has learned how to compensate, however. He texts and uses a website to share information with his team and other coaches, and relies on his junior varsity coach and captains within Linganore.
“Would it be easier if I were teaching at Linganore? Yes. Or if I were coaching at Tuscarora? Absolutely,” Putterman said. “But that’s not the card that I was dealt, and I wouldn’t trade this hand in for any other hand.”
That’s because he enjoys teaching his opponents, despite the hassles.
“It’s made for some nice relationships,” Putterman said. “In fact, some of my favorite students have been — in the past and currently are — Tuscarora soccer players. We have something in common, and we get along very, very well.”
As Putterman’s relationships with his students develop during the school year, classroom chatter inevitably turns to soccer and some subsequent ribbing. He said he kids even more with the soccer players on his tennis team, because he has a more casual relationship with his players than his students.
The Titans have eliminated the Lancers from the playoffs each of the past two years, but Linganore has become more competitive under Putterman. He said his players largely ignore their coach’s split allegiances unless Putterman wears a green shirt to practice.
Then, he gets it from both sides.
“That’s the fun part,” Putterman said. “It’s awkward at times, but it is so much fun to get into the little rivalries.”
He also said that many of “the same kids that are scared of you in class the next morning” go to Linganore-Tuscarora games to taunt their teacher.
While he admitted he would consider staying at one school if the opportunity arises, he says “we” and “they” so interchangeably that it’s unclear where his stronger alliance resides.
As he said: “No way I would change it right now.”
dfeldman@gazette.net
The story originally referred to Allison Yard as a coach at Tuscarora.