Mike Rigoni is a good basketball coach. So we were surprised Thursday when we found out his teaching position at Routt had been cut, and he would no longer be coaching there. Routt offered to let him stay on as coach, but without the teaching job, obviously it wouldn’t have worked for him.

Over the past several years, the same thing has happened at several area schools, and I’m thinking particularly about Carrollton. Budget cuts force the board to reduce staff, and sometimes, the staff member is also a coach. It’s not a good situation for the coach, the school or the players. Budget cuts are never good.

Routt had a ton of talent this year and should have gone further in the playoffs, but a couple of things happened during the season that kept the team from being everything it might have been and doing everything it might have done. There really wasn’t much Rigoni could have done to prevent either one of them.

We don’t know everything that goes on behind the scenes — sometimes, that’s for the best — but I don’t think another coach could have gotten more out of that team than Rigoni did. Through it all, Routt still won a share of the WIVC championship in 2007-08. That was no small accomplishment this season, with teams like co-champ A-C Central/Virginia, Carrollton and West Central to contend with.

Over the past three years it was interesting to see Routt progress as a team and to see Rigoni progress as a coach. Routt was his first head coaching job. The Rockets lost some big leads this year, which made some people a little crazy, but they almost always came out on the winning end. For some reason, people forget that.

Routt won a lot of games this year. The team went 22-7, and Routt was always fun to watch. No area team ran the fast break better than Routt did. And no coach was any more gracious after a win or a loss than Rigoni. No matter what happened, he was always willing to talk to us, and he was always willing to have the interview videotaped. No matter what. He took some shots from some of the posters on our Web site — some fair, some unfair — but he never once complained about that, either. I think he understood that criticism comes with the job. That’s kind of a rare thing in itself, especially for someone who hasn’t been a head coach for that long.

But Rigoni was kind of a rare coach in a lot of ways.

Best of luck, coach.

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