Tish Maclay gave Mifflin County athletics her heart

BY BRIAN CARSON

I don’t remember the first game I ever covered with Tish Maclay on the sideline.

I don’t remember the weather, the opponent, or whether Indian Valley won or lost. I don’t remember whether I filed the story in a hurry, which is usually how those things went.

I remember the smile.

That was Tish.

Before the roster, before the quote, before the question about who scored or who assisted, there was that smile. Big, bright, welcoming. The kind of smile that made you feel like you hadn’t walked into somebody’s workplace. You’d walked into a place where somebody was glad to see you.

That matters more than people think.

Sports can be a hard subject sometimes. It can be loud, rushed and tense, full of schedules, mistakes, parents, coaches and kids carrying more pressure than we care to admit. A reporter walks into that room looking for information and a place to stand. You can tell pretty quickly whether you’re welcome or just one more thing on somebody’s long list.

With Tish Maclay, you felt welcome.

I met her in 1995, when she was coaching field hockey at Indian Valley. I didn’t know then that I was meeting someone who would become one of the steady hands in Mifflin County athletics. I didn’t know I’d still be thinking about her all these years later, now that she’s stepping down as Mifflin County athletic director at the end of the school year.

You rarely know those things in the moment.

You meet people on ordinary afternoons. A game is about to start. Someone is checking the clock. A coach has a whistle around her neck. A reporter has a notebook in his hand. Nobody is thinking about legacy.

Then the years do exactly that.

They gather.

They gather in fall afternoons, winter nights, tournament schedules, bus rides, postponements, coaching changes, senior nights, and the hundred minor problems that have to be solved before anyone in the stands gets to watch a kid play.

That’s the part most people never see.

They see the teams run onto the field. They see the scoreboard light up. They see the players lined up for the national anthem and the coaches leaning forward from the bench. They see a big game feel like a big game.

They don’t always see the person who helped make sure the game could happen.

That was part of Tish’s gift. She did a lot of work that didn’t get applause. She had that way about her. She could be busy, and she almost always was, but she still made room for people. She made room for the media. She made room for the coaches. Most importantly, she made room for the student-athletes.

That’s where any tribute to her has to begin and end.

Tish Maclay was dedicated to student-athletes and to Mifflin County athletics. That sounds simple until you’ve watched what the job asks of a person. Dedication in high school sports is measured in time. It’s measured in nights away from home, in weekends cut short, in small fires put out before anybody else smells smoke. It’s measured by being the person people come to when something goes wrong and the person they forget to thank when everything goes right.

An athletic director’s job is rarely romantic from the inside. It’s paperwork, logistics, and weather forecasts. It’s officials and transportation. It’s gym space and field space. It’s a schedule that looks clean on paper until the rain comes, the bus is late, a conflict pops up, or somebody needs an answer five minutes ago.

When everything works, people call it a normal night.

That’s the strange bargain of the job. Success often sounds like silence.

No one complained because the event started on time. No one noticed because the officials were there. No one pauses to wonder how the moving parts came together. The kids play, the crowd cheers, the story gets written, and everyone goes home believing the night arranged itself.

It didn’t.

People arranged it.

For a long time, Tish arranged a lot of it.

I saw enough over the years to know what that means. I saw the professionalism. I saw how she treated the media. She went out of her way to accommodate us, even when it couldn’t have been easy or convenient. A good athletic director understands that local sports coverage is part of the life of a community. It gives families something to save. It tells kids that what they did mattered enough for somebody to write it down.

Tish understood that.

She made the job easier for those of us trying to tell those stories. That may sound like a small thing, but in local sports, small things are often the whole machinery. A returned message. A roster. A quick answer. A little patience when the deadline is coming, and the details are moving faster than the pen.

She was good with all of that.

And she did it without making you feel like a burden.

That’s a rare quality. Some people help you while letting you know how much trouble you’re causing. Tish helped you and somehow made you feel like you were part of the same evening, part of the same effort, part of the same Mifflin County sports family.

Family is a word people use too loosely sometimes. With Tish, it feels right.

Local athletics can become a kind of extended family if you’re around it long enough. You see kids grow up. You see coaches age. You see parents who once sat in the stands become grandparents in the stands. You see names come around again. You see, the memory of Indian Valley and Lewistown carried into Mifflin County in ways that still matter to people.

Tish was part of that bridge.

There’s another part of her legacy, too, and anyone who knows her knows it matters most. Tish raised two amazing sons and athletes, John Michael and Isaac Maclay. In a life so often pulled toward gyms, fields, schedules, and other people’s children, she never lost sight of her own. That says something about her. The same care people saw in her work, the same warmth and humor, lived at home first.

She had her own place in the history of girls' sports here, too. Inspired by beloved softball coach, the late Jaynee Carolus, Maclay helped expand opportunities for girls to participate in sports in Mifflin County. That part of her story deserves more than a passing mention.

It wasn’t that long ago when girls had to push harder for space, attention, equal seriousness, and the simple right to have their games treated as something worthy. Every community has people who help move that line forward. They don’t always make a speech about it. They don’t always get a plaque for it. Sometimes they coach. Sometimes they organize. Sometimes they stay in the work long enough that the next generation of girls enters a gym or steps onto a field expecting opportunity because someone before them helped make it feel normal.

Tish helped do that.

That’s a legacy.

It’s one thing to win games. It’s another thing to help build the conditions in which more kids get to have games to win, games to lose, games to remember. The final score fades quicker than we think. The feeling lasts.

A girl remembers wearing the uniform.

A senior remembers the last home game.

A team remembers the night the gym felt alive.

And somewhere in all of that memory, Tish was there.

For a long time, she was there.

There’s a particular tenderness in seeing someone step away from a job that has been woven into so many other people’s lives. The job will be filled. The schedules will continue. The lights will come on again. High school sports have a way of moving forward because the next season never asks whether we’re ready for it.

But it won’t feel quite the same.

I’ll miss her.

I’ll miss that smile and the humor that came with it. I’ll miss knowing she was somewhere nearby, making things easier for everyone else. I’ll miss the feeling that when I walked into a Mifflin County athletic event, Tish Maclay had already done the hard work that allowed the rest of us to enjoy the night.

That’s what people like her give a place. And when they finally step away, the rest of us begin to understand how much of the background music they had been playing all along.

I wish Tish nothing but the best in whatever comes next. She has earned the peace of a slower evening, if such a thing exists for her. She has earned the gratitude of the coaches she helped, the athletes she served, the reporters she accommodated, and the community she represented so well.

I hope she knows how much she meant to Mifflin County athletics.

I hope she knows how much she meant to those of us who had the privilege of knowing her from the sidelines, the gyms, the fields, and the press tables.

And I hope she knows this, too.

To me, she wasn’t simply an athletic director.

She is someone I love like family.