The Way Forward
One of the dumbest and utterly untrue statements that I have heard repeatedly in my professional career is “It doesn't matter who you report to.” This is usually given as a reason not to get upset when a boss leaves or there is a reorganization. I think corporations have maybe stopped using this so much recently, because times have changed. I have had dozens of bosses over the years and I can't think of anything more important when it comes to your job. Sometimes you get a great boss that you didn't sign up for and sometimes you get a terrible one that you did sign up for. All of this is to say is that your relationship with your leader matters a great deal.
Coach Christy Holly is no longer the leader of Racing Louisville FC on the field. There are probably some players happy to see him leave and some that are sad. It's hard to know what the players are thinking right now, but we know that Coach Holly was instrumental in getting several current players to sign with Racing. In fact, I’m sure he had a say in all of the roster decisions. Better writers and reporters will dig into the “why”, so I want to talk about the “what now?”
Sometimes clubs have a rigid philosophy. I’m not sure I like that. I think it's fine for a coach or organization to have a general philosophy about how they want to play in the short term, but times change. In fact I reject the idea of “the way we do things”. Appeal to tradition is a logical fallacy in which a person or people claim that just because something is tradition, it is the correct way forward. In short, it's the fallacy of “that's the way we've always done it.” Even though LouCity/Racing hasn't been around that long it's easy to fall into this behavior, especially if your highest leadership doesn't change much or all come from the same philosophical background.
I don't know how things run at the club. I have no real insight or access into the day to day. That's OK. The problem is that nobody does. The organization does what organizations do: they try to control the message. They have every right to do this. We as fans have every right to question their motivation when they do. We may never know exactly what happened that cost Coach Holly his job. I’m not sure that we even deserve to know. What we do deserve is an explanation on what the club will do to make sure whatever happened doesn't happen again. Part of that explanation I want to hear is how the club is changing to prevent history repeating itself. Let's be honest here. The NWSL has a coaching problem. How does Racing ensure that they expand the hiring pool to include better candidates and we just don't get more of the same? We'll be watching.
