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    Monica Aldama, Coach in Netflix Series ‘Cheer,’ Retires

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    The series propelled Monica Aldama to become one of the most famous cheer coaches in the country.Her obsessive goal of training an elite small-town cheer squad into national champions made Monica Aldama one of the most famous cheer coaches in the country.But Ms. Aldama, who entranced viewers in the popular Netflix documentary series “Cheer” before her team became mired in a series of controversies, will no longer be head coach at Navarro College. The community college in Texas announced her retirement from its cheer program on Thursday after nearly three decades of coaching.“There is not a larger figure in the sport of cheer than Monica Aldama,” said Michael Landers, the college’s executive director of student services and athletics. “She is an icon in the sport and built our program from the ground up with class, grace and a championship mindset.”A former cheerleader herself, Ms. Aldama was hired to teach mathematics and sponsor the cheerleading program at the college in the small town of Corsicana. Over the next few years, she built it into a championship-winning juggernaut that drew ambitious practitioners of competitive cheerleading, who often perform physically grueling stunts and gymnastics.Under her leadership, the team won 17 national titles in annual collegiate competitions in Daytona Beach, Fla., organized by the National Cheerleaders Association.The niche world of Navarro Cheer, and its head coach, burst into the mainstream in the 2020 Netflix series ”Cheer,” after a documentary crew followed the team as it prepared for a competition. The series gave audiences an intimate front-row seat for the trials of the squad’s cheerleaders, as they endured Ms. Aldama’s meticulous training sessions and confronted more personal problems.Ms. Aldama’s no-nonsense coaching style and demand for discipline left some viewers inspired. Others, however, were unsettled by her determination to push Navarro’s cheerleaders to win the title.The show’s success made stars out of Ms. Aldama, whose students called her “the queen,” and her cheerleaders, leading to appearances on talk shows, a spoof on “Saturday Night Live” and even a live tour. Ms. Aldama joined the ranks of reality TV royalty by competing on “Dancing With the Stars,” and she released a book in 2022.But the team also was shaken by scandal. One fan favorite cheerleader, Jerry Harris, was accused of using his status to solicit sexually explicit content from teenage boys. Mr. Harris was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2022 after pleading guilty to two charges of sex crimes involving minors. A second season of the show, two years after the first, showed Ms. Aldama and other members of the squad grappling with that revelation.Then, a former cheerleader on the team claimed in a civil suit filed in April that Ms. Aldama had pressured her to keep quiet after she accused another team member of sexually assaulting her on campus.Ms. Aldama called the allegations “demonstrably false,” in a statement, and said she had been temporarily suspended from participating in cheerleading by its national governing body, USA Cheer, as it investigated the complaint. Navarro College, which was also named as a defendant, also denied any wrongdoing.She was later dropped as a defendant in the lawsuit, according to an amended complaint filed in May. A lawyer for the plaintiff did not immediately respond to a request for comment about why Ms. Aldama had been dropped from the case.Ms. Aldama decided to retire in part because she and Elizabeth Pillans, an administrator who had also been listed in the civil lawsuit and later dropped from it, planned to file a lawsuit.“She did not want forthcoming litigation she and Ms. Pillans intend to file to distract from the upcoming Navarro College cheer season,” Russell Prince, her lawyer, said in a statement.Ms. Aldama has since returned to coaching and no longer appears on USA Cheer’s suspensions list. A spokeswoman for USA Cheer said in a statement that Ms. Aldama had been removed from the list after the organization completed its “investigation and adjudication process.”In an Instagram post last month, Ms. Aldama expressed “incredible relief” about USA Cheer’s decision, but criticized the organization for its handling of the investigation.“Everything Ms. Aldama has endured in the last year has done nothing to protect athletes and participants in sport,” Mr. Prince said, adding that she hoped USA Cheer would work with her to address her concerns.She will retire after finishing the fall 2023 semester, Navarro College said in its announcement.Lola Fadulu More

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      Gary Gaines, Coach of ‘Friday Night Lights’ Fame, Dies at 73

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      He coached the Permian High School Panthers in Odessa, Texas, for four seasons in the 1980s, including the one that became the subject of a best-selling book.Gary Gaines, who coached the high school football team in West Texas that was the subject of “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream,” the best-selling book that inspired a feature film and a television series, died on Monday in Lubbock, Texas. He was 73.The death, at a memory care facility, was confirmed by his wife, Sharon (Hicks) Gaines, who said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.The Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas, were a powerhouse team that had won four state championships by the time Mr. Gaines was hired as its head coach in 1986. He had already coached four other high school teams in Texas and had become renowned for his teaching skills.“He was a quiet leader who trusted his coaches to do their jobs and saw the game from all perspectives, not just one side or the ball or the other,” Don Billingsley, a running back for Permian in the 1980s, said in a phone interview. “He was a great coach and a great mentor.”Permian’s high profile in Texas and its prospects for success in 1988 lured the writer Buzz Bissinger to move temporarily to Odessa, follow the team and write what became “Friday Night Lights,” published in 1990. Mr. Bissinger was fascinated to learn that the team played before as many as 20,000 fans on Friday nights.“Twenty thousand,” he wrote. “I had to go there.”He portrayed Mr. Gaines as a man under great pressure to win, in a state obsessed with high school football and a city whose fans demanded success. When the Panthers lost a game by one point late in the season, Mr. Gaines arrived home to find several “For Sale” signs planted in his lawn — “a not-so subtle hint that maybe it was best for everyone if he just got the hell out of town,” Mr. Bissinger wrote.A knee injury wrecked the season for the team’s star running back, James Miles, known as Boobie, and the Panthers did not win a fifth title, losing in a semifinal game of the state playoffs. After the game, Mr. Gaines gathered his tearful players in a circle and led them in prayer.“Father,” Mr. Bissinger quoted him as saying, “it hurts so much because we did so many things good and came up short.”After “Friday Night Lights” was published, Mr. Gaines said he felt betrayed by Mr. Bissinger, because he had not produced a more positive account of how football brought the Odessa community together. Mr. Gaines admitted that he had not read the book, but based on what he had been told, he said he objected most to its description of racism in Odessa, in particular toward Mr. Miles, who is Black and whom an assistant coach at Permian referred to with a racial slur.Mr. Gaines told The Marshall News Messenger of Marshall, Texas, in 2009 that his wife called him sobbing after she read the book, saying it made the community look like a “bunch of racists.” He added: “There’s rednecks all around here just like there is in Lubbock. You can go anywhere you want and hear the N-word.”Mr. Bissinger, in a phone interview, said, “He thought I had betrayed him because it wasn’t a puff piece, but I’m not the one who said what was said about Boobie.” He added, “It’s a tough place to be a coach, and he handled it with great dignity.”Billy Bob Thornton portrayed Mr. Gaines in the 2004 film “Friday Night Lights,” based on Buzz Bissinger’s 1990 book of the same name.Ralph Nelson/UniversalWhen “Friday Night Lights” was turned into a film in 2004 by the director Peter Berg, Billy Bob Thornton was cast as Mr. Gaines. In his review in The New York Times, the critic A.O. Scott wrote that Mr. Thornton, in a “sly and thorough performance,” portrayed Mr. Gaines “as “neither a my-way-or-the-highway autocrat nor a rah-rah motivator.”Two years later, when “Friday Night Lights” was adapted as a television series, it was set in a fictional town — Dillon, Texas — and the high school team was coached by a fictional character, Eric Taylor (played by Kyle Chandler). Connie Britton played the coach’s wife in both the film and the series.Gary Alan Gaines was born on May 4, 1949, in Crane, Texas. His father, Durwood, was a superintendent at a Gulf Oil plant; his mother, Dorothy (Burnett) Gaines, was a homemaker. After playing quarterback in high school, Gary moved to wingback at Angelo State University, in San Angelo, Texas, graduating in 1971.He began his long Texas coaching journey as an assistant at high schools in Fort Stockton and Monahans. He became the head coach at high schools in Petersburg and Denver City before moving to Permian, as an assistant, in time to help the Panthers win a state title in 1980. He was subsequently the head coach at Tascosa High School in Amarillo, Monahans High School and Permian.In 1989, Mr. Gaines led the undefeated Panthers to a state championship. In all, he had a 46-7-1 record as head coach at Permian. But he soon left to join Texas Tech University as an assistant coach.“He loved coaching and he loved the kids,” Ms. Gaines, his wife, said in a phone interview, explaining his peripatetic movements. “When we got out of college, he went after his first job. But after that, everybody came after him.”After four seasons at Texas Tech, he returned to coaching high school in Abilene and San Angelo before being named the head coach at Abilene Christian University. Following a subpar 21-30 record, he resigned and spent two years as the athletic director of the school district in Ector, which includes Odessa, and another two as the athletic director of the district in Lubbock.In 2009, he returned to Permian as head coach, but that run was not as successful as the first had been; over four seasons, the Panthers had a 23-21 record, including one playoff victory. Mr. Gaines resigned in 2012 from what would be his final coaching job.“We’re going to give it to someone else and, hopefully, they can make more out of it than we did,” Mr. Gaines told The Associated Press. “We came here to make some deep playoff runs, and we weren’t able to do that.”In 2017, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Nicole Strader; his son, Bradley; his sisters, Dana Howland and Tamra Reidhead; and five grandchildren.Mr. Bissinger said that he visited Mr. Gaines at Abilene Christian University about 20 years after the publication of “Friday Night Light.”“I went into his office and he looked like he’d seen a ghost,” Mr. Bissinger said. “We had a nice 15-minute conversation, and he couldn’t have been nicer.”But, he added: “He kept saying I had betrayed him. He has the right to think what he wants.” More

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      Blue Jays Manager Charlie Montoyo Moonlights at Salsa Clubs

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      The salsa band was 45 minutes into their first set at Lula Lounge on a recent Saturday when Charlie Montoyo showed up at the front door. An owner of the music club spotted Montoyo and led him and his group to a table reserved for them closest to the stage.Montoyo, 56, took off his jacket and waved to the band members he knew. Moments later, Montoyo, the manager of the Toronto Blue Jays — one of the top teams in Major League Baseball — was up there with the band and was handed a güiro, a staple of Latin American music. A smile remained on his face for the next two and a half hours.“Tonight, we’re accompanied by our great manager of the Blue Jays,” Luis Franco, the lead singer of his self-titled band, told the audience in Spanglish. He signaled for Montoyo to join him at the front of the stage and continued, “This guy is doing an impeccable job with our team. A round of applause, please.”Montoyo stepped forward, embraced Franco, smiled and waved to the crowd. But he quickly returned to his preferred position: with the band members, among the instruments.Montoyo, in white shirt, played the güiro with the Luis Franco Worldwide Salsa band on a recent night in Toronto.Brendan Ko for The New York TimesBaseball may be the driving force of Montoyo’s life, but music has been the underlying beat. His stadium office is cluttered with bongos, congas, timbales, maracas and records. He plays salsa music to relax before games. And sometimes, he spends weekends during the season accompanying bands in night clubs with a güiro, an instrument which produces sound by rubbing a stick against a notched hollow gourd.“Charlie jumping onstage has been a thing our whole relationship,” Montoyo’s wife, Sam, said in a recent phone interview. “I remember looking up during our wedding after talking to people, and he’s onstage with the band.”On the field, the Blue Jays are a diverse and vibrant bunch. After a player homers, his teammates rush to get him a blue jacket, which features the names of the many countries represented on the team, from Canada to the Dominican Republic to Cuba to South Korea.Montoyo is from Puerto Rico and his vibrant team celebrates home runs with a jacket that honors the countries where players on the roster were born.John E. Sokolowski/USA Today Sports, via ReutersMontoyo is their boisterous leader, though it took him a long time to reach this point. After 18 highly successful years of managing in the minors for the Tampa Bay Rays and four years of coaching in the majors, he finally got his chance to manage Toronto in 2019.The 2022 M.L.B. Season“Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls, it’s more democratic.”An Ace Seeks a New Title: Dave Stewart has been a star player, a coach, an agent and an executive. To truly change baseball, he wants to own a team.Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good. Smell Good?: For numerous players, a heavy dose of cologne or women’s perfume is the unlikeliest of performance enhancers.The Third Baseman’s Gambit: Manny Machado is the hottest hitter in baseball, and he is coming for your Queen.King of Throws: Tom House has spent his life helping superstars get even better. With a new app he wants to fix young pitchers before they develop bad habits.He took over a promising but rebuilt roster and guided it to the playoffs in 2020. The Blue Jays fell one win shy of another postseason appearance last season but entered 2022 as a popular preseason World Series pick. Through Wednesday, they were 33-23.Every step of the way for Montoyo, the soundtrack has been salsa.“He’s been phenomenal,” Blue Jays General Manager Ross Atkins said of Montoyo. “His experiences have always been attractive to me, personally. His minor league experiences, his playing experiences, his cultural experiences. He’s been exactly what we had hoped for in hiring him and then some.”From the small town of Florida, Puerto Rico, Montoyo was raised around salsa and baseball. After a four-game call-up with the Montreal Expos in 1993 and 1,028 games in the minors, Montoyo retired and began his coaching career.“I always wanted to be a baseball player,” he said sitting in his office at the Rogers Centre in Toronto. “I never thought I’d be a musician. But little by little, I played more. And I love salsa. But now, yes, I’d love to be a musician.”Unlike his brothers, Montoyo never took music classes or joined the school band. Growing up, he learned music organically. At parrandas, a Puerto Rican tradition that is like Christmas caroling at night, he helped play the maracas, güiro or tambourine as they went door to door. At gatherings on the beach, he watched others play the congas and picked it up himself.Montoyo has a large collection of instruments at his permanent residence in Tucson, Ariz., and at his office at the Rogers Centre, which is also a shrine in equal parts to Puerto Rico and salsa. His wife surprised him with an autographed painting of his favorite musician, Herman Olivera, and a new set of congas for the office after he was hired by Toronto.Montoyo’s love of music has led to him keeping records on hand to play along with in his office.Brendan Ko for The New York TimesThe office is like a shrine both to Puerto Rico and to salsa music in general.Brendan Ko for The New York TimesMontoyo said meeting or getting to know some of his musical heroes — such as Roberto Roena, Oscar Hernández, Eddie Palmieri and Olivera — has meant more to him than meeting many famous baseball players.During spring training in 2019, Montoyo hosted an impromptu performance in his office in Dunedin, Fla., with the singer Marc Anthony, whose entertainment company has a baseball agency that represents the Blue Jays star first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Anthony sang “Aguanile,” the salsa classic by Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, while Montoyo handled the bongos. Other members of the Blue Jays coaching staff from Puerto Rico joined in.(The night of Montoyo’s recent visit to Lula Lounge, he texted Anthony a video of his performance. “Wow,” Anthony wrote back. “What swing, papito. I love it. Made my day.”)Montoyo holds jam sessions often. He once invited a few musicians from the club to his office, and they played until 4 a.m. But most of the time, Montoyo is by himself, cuing up music videos on the TV hours before a game and playing along.“We’re in a competitive sport, and the position he’s in comes with a lot of pressure and attention from the moment he walks in the clubhouse,” said Hector Lebron, 44, an interpreter for the Blue Jays who played for Montoyo as a Tampa Bay minor leaguer. “He uses the music to relax a little bit and to think.”Montoyo first played at Lula Lounge in 2019. During pregame batting practice in May, he met some of the musicians from the club who had heard about his musical ability through mutual friends. In their conversation, Luis “Luisito” Orbegoso, a well-known local artist, said he could tell Montoyo knew what he was talking about and invited him to the club that night. Montoyo came and played, and that started their friendship.Brought on stage at Lula Lounge, Montoyo was handed a güiro and asked to play along with the band. Brendan Ko for The New York Times“Whenever he’s in Toronto, he calls me to ask, ‘When are we going to play? When are we going to rumbear?’” said Orbegoso, 51, who was born in Peru and moved to Canada when he was 12. “Including in the winter, the off-season, he contacts me and sends me videos. We’re pure salsa.”Lula Lounge was among the things Montoyo missed most about Toronto from 2020 to 2021, when Canada’s pandemic border restrictions forced the Blue Jays to play a majority of their home games in Buffalo and their spring-training facility in Florida.“He’s got a home here,” said Jose Ortega, a co-owner of Lula Lounge who began hosting salsa dance lessons at his apartment in Toronto in 2000 before that grew after two years into the permanent restaurant and club that he co-owns with Jose Nieves. “We see him as almost another band member.”Montoyo has played at Lula Lounge six times in all, including twice this season after Saturday afternoon home games. He often goes with team officials or coaches and has brought his wife when she was visiting from Arizona, where she stays during the school year with their youngest son. Montoyo was tired the day of his most recent visit — the Blue Jays were in the middle of a stretch of 20 straight days of games — but the club is his escape.“If Sam knows it’s Saturday and we lost a tough game and I’m at the apartment alone, she tells me to go there and enjoy,” Montoyo said.Montoyo stayed on stage until just after midnight, leaving only because his baseball team had a game later that day.Brendan Ko for The New York TimesSo after the Blue Jays beat the Houston Astros — a game from which Montoyo was ejected in the fifth inning for arguing a called third strike to Guerrero — he was at Lula Lounge with the Luis Franco Worldwide Salsa band.“We call it swing,” said Alex Naar, 42, a percussionist for the band who lent Montoyo a güiro and guided him through the more modern arrangements. “He has a natural swing for the music. He feels it in his heart. He has the rhythm.”After the first set, Montoyo posed for photos with a few fans. As a D.J. played salsa and reggaeton classics, Montoyo darted up to the empty stage to play congas along with the song. And when the band returned for their second set, he rejoined them.“Baseball is very Caribbean,” said Ortega, who was born in Ecuador and raised in New York. “It’s Puerto Rican, it’s Dominican, Venezuelan, and the whole rhythm and style and panache that Latinos bring to the game. That vibe, it kind of goes together. So to me, when Charlie was there, I thought, ‘Wow, this is a funny, perfect marriage of all of those things.’”In all aspects of his life, Montoyo has tried to represent his island, from the field to the stage.“It’s hard to reach this level,” he said of his job. “I sincerely never expected to reach it after so many years. That’s why I have the Puerto Rican flag on my glove, everywhere. I’m proud of where I’m from and the music.”Not long after midnight, with a few songs left in the second set of his recent visit to Lula Lounge, Montoyo was done. He handed the güiro back to Naar, gave him a hug and said his goodbyes. He didn’t want to leave but the Blue Jays had a 1 p.m. game. He grabbed his jacket and left with the team employees who had come along. He will be back. More

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      ‘King Otto’ Review: For Greece, a Whole Different Ballgame.

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      Christopher André Marks analyzes the Greek national soccer team’s championship season under the leadership of a German coach.“King Otto,” which opens with a quote from “The Odyssey,” treats its retelling of a soccer underdog story as the stuff of myth. In 2004, the German coach Otto Rehhagel led the Greek national team to victory in the European Championship. The team had never even won a match at a major competition before. According to the closing titles, Rehhagel became the first foreign-born coach to win a major international soccer tournament for another country’s national team.In this documentary directed by Christopher André Marks, the coach, the players and others recount Rehhagel’s arrival in Greece as someone who didn’t understand the culture or speak the language. (In its opening minutes, “King Otto” makes clear that the offscreen filmmaker and Rehhagel also had a linguistic barrier to overcome.) Ioannis Topalidis, who became Rehhagel’s assistant coach and the interpreter connecting him with the players, emerges as one of the liveliest subjects.Somewhat gratingly, “King Otto” treats its story as a tale of national stereotypes colliding head-to-head. Vassilis Gagatsis, the president of the Hellenic Football Federation at the time, says he hired Rehhagel because he thought that “being a German, he would be able to instill the discipline that we Greeks lack.” One player says that the team “became calmer and cold-blooded” under Rehhagel. According to Gagatsis, the German coach turned out to have “the heart of a Greek.”“King Otto” is less grandiose and more granular when it goes match by match through the 2004 tournament. The briskly edited recap probably holds more suspense for those who didn’t follow the events than those who did.King OttoNot rated. In Greek and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More