Kid Coach

Adults may teach children lessons about behaving respectfully toward others but occasionally need to be reminded themselves. In Kid Coach, a little boy wrestles his father into physical shape and into wrestling with his conscience about his attitudes towards winning. The teachable-moment story will appeal to the kinesthetic side of young readers, especially boys, but, while the story is humorous and has a positive message, it lacks nuance that could really deliver a clean finish, to use a wrestling term.

Ottawa’s Rob Justus makes his debut as both the writer and illustrator of this brightly coloured picture book, published by Page Street Kids, a publisher “focusing on new talent and artist-led narrative picture books,” according to their submission guidelines. The art is outsized, the characters’ reactions unmistakably big and fun to look at, the vivid colours contrasting boldly with the white background on the pages. The text is set in a large sans serif type to complement the spare narrative and the large format paper. Justus makes liberal use of bold and even larger sized type to emphasize lines of text.

The story revolves around a little boy who acts as his father’s coach and transforms him “From couch potato to true champion.” On the road to fitness, Dad forgets to be a good sport, hurting the feelings of those he has defeated, some of them pretty huge and scary-looking. The pictures show Dad strutting and bragging, razzing his opponents in a display of unacceptable rudeness. The Kid realizes he has not taught his father the most important lessons, that being kind toward others matters most of all, that leading with one’s heart and inspiring others to keep going “make everyone feel like a winner.” Kid Coach learns a lesson, too.

Dad is ashamed, offers a sincere apology and the relationships are repaired with a bag of chips with dip.

As such, Kid Coach is a positive story that can be used to teach good manners in sports as well as life in general. Justus uses wry humour both in the text and the illustrations to hold a child’s attention.

Yet, the story is told, not shown, which makes it one-dimensional instead of layered. Although Kid Coach is the main character, he spends most of his time observing, not interacting. Instead of dialogue between the characters, Justus relies on the illustrations to show the dad’s deteriorating behavior and Kid Coach’s disappointment.

Despite being aimed at very young children, there are opportunities to enrich the plot in a realistic way. It would be fun for a child to know if Kid Coach became a winning coach. There is no development of the opponents’ personalities as such development would make the reader more sympathetic to their hurt feelings. As well, Dad’s entreaties to the wronged wrestlers could have been much more moving rather than the gimmicky chips pulled out of his wrestling costume.

More substance over form could make Kid Coach a good book, a much more effective book, with the plot leading the art, instead of the other way around.