There are good coaches and there are bad coaches. But the worst coach of all is a bad coach who can win ball games.

Winning is not an isolated criterion for what makes a great leader, and there are too many people in too many places who have forgotten that. There is no shortage of small towns or even big ones ready to welcome the worst sort of coach — willing to overlook all and risk more — for a chance to win.

Once such a place was Hoover.

Today such a place is Pell City.

There’s a scene from Two-a-Days, the early 2000s MTV reality show about Hoover Bucs football, that showed a handful of Hoover students sitting around a table at Johnny Rockets. While drinking milkshakes and munching on fries, the young men reflected on quitting the football team and walking away from its notorious coach, Rush Propst.

The MTV show would make Propst the most famous high school football coach in the country, but Hoover High School football had already become what Paul Finebaum called the third college program in the state — under the leadership of its coach, shown on film screaming at an injured player to get up as medical staff attended to the kid lying flat on the ground.

At Johnny Rocket’s, one kid recalled how Propst shamed anyone who considered walking away.

“If you quit this football team, you’re the guy who lets his friend die in ‘Saving Private Ryan’” Propst had told them.

Another chimed in: “At the bottom of the stairs!”

“This isn’t war. This is football,” the first kid said, and they laughed again.

But their uncertainty was palpable — left to figure out for themselves a lesson the adults should have told them from the start.

Something that never should have been in question — that how you win is as important as what you win, that winning for winning’s sake can be worse than losing.

That walking away from something you sense to be wrong isn’t the same as quitting.

That character is destiny.

Sometimes the most important life lessons are the ones you have to learn on your own.

But this is Alabama. This is the South. And it’s a lesson many here never learn. Including whole school systems.

It’s a lesson folks keep flunking over and over again, most recently at another school system here in Alabama.

Propst left Hoover under circumstances almost wholly unrelated to his work — he had a secret second family that suddenly wasn’t so secret anymore. That’s the thing that cost him his job. Not being a toxic human volcano in full view of a national television audience, which seemed to bother no one, so long as he won football games.

It bothered other schools even less.

In the years that followed, Propst coached with similar results in Georgia, where he was pushed out of two jobs.

“We needed a football coach who could win,” Colquitt County School Board Member Debra Hampton told ESPN in 2013.

He gave them that much.

After Propst headbutted a player in 2016, the school kept him on.

In 2019, an investigation revealed he had broken rules about administering medicine to students and that he had hundreds of thousands of dollars of unpaid taxes. That time, the Colquitt County system fired Propst.

A high school in Valdosta, Ga., couldn’t resist and quickly picked Propst up.

He lasted about a year.

That school system let him go after he was caught on tape talking about arranging financial support to recruit players to his school. The team was barred from the state playoffs and four players were ruled ineligible.

Propst’s comeback stories aren’t of an imperfect man rising from the ashes, but rather, a serial arsonist moving from town to town.

And in April, Pell City Schools hired Propst to bring his spark back to Sweet Home Alabama.

Friday night, the first spark flew.

On the sidelines of a game against Moody, Propst slung his headset at a player — his own son — breaking the equipment.

After the game, Propst said his son was about to run on the field to join a confrontation between other players.

Yeah, he blamed his outburst on his kid.

This isn’t a comeback story. It’s not about second chances. It’s a story of schools making the same choice over and over again and expecting a different result.

There’s been little about this man’s career to suggest hiring him is anything but a pact made with a devil — a deal made by desperate school systems that lost sight of their purpose.

And at every stop, the ending has been utterly predictable.

The bargain of student athletics has always been a lopsided one. For a few, it ostensibly offers the opportunity at an education — a doorway into college where student-athletes may attend class between games and practices. (On Two-a-Days, Propst taunted players in the locker room, telling them he was the one who decided who got scholarships.)

For the rest, the ostensible value is to imbue life lessons about teamwork, diligence and discipline — things lumped into the larger bucket called character.

Anyone entrusting their sons to Rush Propst to learn character has already lost the script. He has played a character, perhaps, and he has spent his career attempting to debunk the old dictum that character is destiny.

And failing.

But somehow, at every stop, boosters and players’ families have defended him — always with the specious argument that the way you win in life is to be a jerk.

What a lesson to pass on to kids — one that seeps into other places where it metastasizes.

Into families, churches and workplaces.

Into public office.

Propst’s hire is a solar-flare-bright signifier that a school has lost all sense of its purpose and priorities.

Anybody who couldn’t look at this man’s background and foresee his employment might lead to problems isn’t smart enough to cross the street by themselves, much less lead an institution for the education of students.

Pell City needs better leaders — in the administrative office and on the field — to put its priorities back in order.

People who can put character before championships.

Someone who can ensure every student walks out of that school prepared for the future, not just Friday night.