If you look up Coach Nolan’s obituary you’ll find out that he was forty-two, single (divorced almost a decade earlier), and had no kids. He’d coached both football and track, and a good chunk of the trophies in the glass cabinet near the front office of the school were thanks to him. When people in town talk about him, they mostly refer to his coaching, all the victories he led VCHS to. But they never mention him as a teacher.

Which, really, is pretty strange, since literally every student had to take at least one of his classes. We all knew Coach. We all cracked jokes about how formal he was, referring to all of his students by their last names, always wearing a jacket and tie in class. Pretty much everyone had done a Coach Nolan impression to amuse their friends at some point.

At the same time, though, almost everyone respected him. He was tough, but fair. I remember the first time I got back an essay I’d written for his class. There was a giant C at the top in red ink. I’d been mortified. I was no straight-A student, but I’d never gotten below a B before.

I went to his desk after class, nervously clutching the graded paper while Sarah waited for me by the door.

“Can I help you with something, Ms. Bauer?” he asked.

“It’s, um, about my grade,” I said, laying the essay on his desk. “Why did I get a C?”

“Because that’s the grade you deserved,” he said simply. He could have dismissed me then and there, but instead he pulled the paper toward him and plucked a red-ink pen from the desk drawer. “Come here.”

I hovered at the edge of the desk and watched as he marked up my paper, showing all of the places where I’d gotten dates or names wrong or where I’d repeated myself in order to meet the assigned word count. In the margins, he wrote out things I could have included, facts I’d missed. Then he handed the paper back to me.

“There was some good material in your essay,” he said. “But not enough of it to warrant a better grade.”

“Can I redo it? For a higher grade?”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid not. This isn’t middle school anymore, Ms. Bauer. Things are going to be tougher. What you can do is use all of the information I just gave you as a road map for how to write a better essay next time.”

At first, I was angry. It was the first semester of my freshman year. He was being way too hard on me, I thought.

But then, when our next essay was due, I did pull out the marked-up copy of my old assignment. I doubled-checked my names and dates, instead of repeating myself I found new material to work into the essay, and I actually used sources beyond just our textbook. And a week later, when Coach Nolan handed it back to me, he did so with a smile. There was a red A at the top of the front page.

Well, A-minus. His class wasn’t going to be that easy.

I’d never felt so proud of myself for a grade before. And I think that was his goal. He made us work hard so that, when we succeeded, it was a real triumph.

Coach Nolan saw the potential in all of us, and just like with Miles, he tried hard to get us to be the best versions of ourselves. Sometimes that meant pushing angry boys to get their act together. Sometimes it meant staying after class to mark up an essay. He provided the map, but we had to reach the destination on our own, so that, when we arrived, it meant so much more.

Thomas Nolan was an award-winning coach.

But if you ask me—or Miles, or almost any of his former students—he was an even better teacher.