I was grading a stack of sophomore essays on The Great Gatsby — it was maybe 11:30 PM, Denise had already gone to bed — and I needed something to keep me from writing "Please actually read the book next time" on every paper. So I put this on. A parable about a high school basketball coach losing his team's heart? Written by a guy who actually coached high school and college ball in Kentucky? That's my world, minus the basketball talent and the Kentucky drawl.
Here's the thing about leadership parables: most of them are painfully thin. You get a one-dimensional protagonist, a wise mentor who speaks exclusively in fortune cookie aphorisms, and a third-act epiphany that lands like a Hallmark card. Gongwer's book flirts with those tropes — it absolutely does — but it earns more than I expected because the setup is honest about something I see every single day in education: the slow, humbling realization that your old playbook doesn't work anymore.
The Janitor Knows More Than the CEO (And the Book Knows It Too)
The structure here is simple but effective. Coach Steve Rocker has two mirrors held up to him: Grant Steffin, a CEO friend who's fighting his own corporate demons, and Joe Taylor, the school janitor. And look — the "wise janitor" archetype is older than Dickens. My students would roll their eyes. But Gongwer, having actually walked those high school hallways himself, gets the texture right. The conversations between Coach Rocker and Joe don't feel like TED Talk scripts. They feel like the conversations I've had in the teachers' lounge at 6:45 AM with custodial staff who've been at the building longer than anyone and see everything nobody else notices.
The contrast between Joe's grounded, faith-driven wisdom and Grant's corporate leadership framework is where the book actually has teeth. Grant isn't a villain — he's a genuinely successful guy applying business logic to human problems, and the book is smart enough to show why that works up to a point and then doesn't. This reminds me of what Hemingway said about prose — that the dignity of movement comes from what's below the surface. Gongwer's best moments are the ones where Coach Rocker sits with a question he can't answer and the book just... lets him sit there.
Brandon Batchelar and the Problem of Earnestness
Batchelar's narration is clean and steady. He reads with the kind of straightforward clarity you want from a parable — no theatrics, no dramatic whisper-to-shout dynamics. He handles the dialogue competently, and the shifts between Rocker's internal wrestling and the spoken exchanges are smooth enough that you don't lose the thread.
But — and I say this as someone who believes the narrator understands that pause is punctuation — I wanted more texture. The emotional peaks of Coach Rocker's transformation needed a little more weight in the delivery. When Rocker starts questioning why he coaches, why he exists, those moments called for something rawer. Batchelar keeps everything at a professional simmer when certain scenes deserved to boil. It's not a flaw exactly, more a ceiling. The performance serves the material without elevating it.
At just under seven hours, the pacing feels right for what this is. No bloat. The prose deserves to be savored — at 1.0x, naturally — but this isn't dense literary fiction. It's a parable with a purpose, and it moves with appropriate directness.
The Faith Question (Let's Be Honest About It)
I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't address this plainly: the "For God's Sake" in the title isn't rhetorical. This is a faith-based leadership book. The spiritual framework isn't a subplot — it's the engine. If you're open to that or actively looking for it, you'll find it integrated naturally into Coach Rocker's arc. If faith-driven self-help isn't your thing, you'll feel it pushing against you by the midpoint.
For me — a guy who teaches Flannery O'Connor and loves her precisely because she smuggles grace into violence — I appreciated that Gongwer doesn't hide the ball. He's upfront about where this is going. The book earns its spiritual conclusions through Rocker's genuine struggle rather than just dropping scripture and calling it character development.
Who This Is Actually For
Coaches. Teachers. Anyone in a leadership role who's hit the wall where their usual motivational tricks stopped working and they're staring at the ceiling at 2 AM wondering if they ever actually knew what they were doing. (So, basically, every educator I know.) If you loved Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, this is its spiritual successor — literally. The insecurity and identity-questioning that drives Rocker's arc also shows up in a very different register in So Long, Insecurity: You've Been a Bad Friend to Us — though I'll be honest, that one landed softer for me than this did.
Skip it if you want literary fiction or if faith-based frameworks make you tune out. No judgment. But if you're a person who leads people — especially young people — and you're tired of leadership books that read like LinkedIn posts, this quiet little parable might catch you off guard.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For?
Almost. It's a good book dressed in a competent audiobook. Not a great one. Gongwer clearly knows the world he's writing about, and that authenticity carries the story further than the prose alone could. I finished it, set down my red pen, and thought about the janitor at my own school. Which is probably exactly what the book wanted me to do.
