It would be a stretch to deem this as eye-opening. Yet, it provided some important perspective.
“It is easy to sit there and judge other parents when they are yelling and screaming at their kids and then you get into it and you find yourself wanting to yell and scream at your kids, too,” Coons explained. “This is true in any sport, but in quarter midgets it seems to be magnified. I don’t know if it is because of the amount of money parents are spending on their kids.
“It’s not just in quarter midgets. We see it with young drivers who don’t race anymore because they just got burned out. Maybe if their parents had been a little calmer that wouldn’t have happened, and their kids would have enjoyed it more and still be involved today.”
Many racing parents wish their kids would have shown an affinity for a less expensive activity, but not long after Cale Coons could walk, Jerry and his wife, Amy, saw the writing on the wall.
“We had a pillar in our living room and we would have to race around that pillar when he was just 2 or 3,” Coons noted. “It got to the point where we had to put a helmet on him with a tear-off.”
It escalated from there.
“We got him one of those crazy karts and they are really cool,” Coons said. “We lived on a cul-de-sac and he jumped into it and he was drifting all the way around on the curb. You could stay on the gas and they would spin you around really fast. He would do that and say, ‘I’m Rico Abreu’ because he saw a video of Rico doing doughnuts.”
It was fast-approaching decision time, but the No. 1 priority for Jerry and Amy Coons was to let their son’s interest dictate the next step.
Cale was barely of school age when the family loaded up and headed to the quarter-midget track in Terre Haute, Ind., to participate in a program for beginners. The parents quickly got all the data they needed.
“You know how quarter-midget tracks are,” Coons said. “It is all slick in the middle and dusty on top. So I said, ‘Hey, when you go out there be sure you keep it in the black.’ He asked why and I said, ‘Well, it gets kind of loose up there and you don’t want to hit the wall.’ He looked disappointed but didn’t say anything. So he is out there running and near the end he goes right up next to the wall all the way around. It scared us to death.
“After he came in, Amy said, ‘You got close to the wall there, what were you doing?’ He said, ‘I just wanted to see what the cushion was like.’ You knew right then that he had it in his blood.”
As Cale Coons has moved forward in his career, there were some who assumed the combination of his pedigree and his father’s experience would guarantee success.
“I think people thought we were going to be fast automatically,” he said. “I mean setting up quarter midgets was so foreign to me and so many things are backward. He also didn’t have the best cars. Could he have been better if I had been able to send him off with somebody else? Probably, but luckily, I had a lot of help.”
As someone who had painstakingly climbed the sport’s ladder, Coons knew that as his son moved forward in this journey the task before him would get progressively harder. There is also the matter of managing everyone’s expectations.
“People will come up to him and ask if he is going to be as good as your dad?” Coons said. “They will even ask me that. I don’t know. Maybe he will and maybe he won’t. I have been fortunate to have had a good career, but that doesn’t mean he will.”
That’s not being harsh, it is a truth learned firsthand. Having spent decades in the sport, Coons knows these kinds of predictions are next to worthless.
“I didn’t think Bryan Clauson was great in quarter midgets,” he said. “But we all know how that turned out. Cale may do great where he is, but will he do that in a midget or a sprint car? We don’t know. So my big thing is for him to race clean. He is racing with adults now and I want them to respect him. I don’t want him to be seen as so many young midget racers are today as being out of control and not having any respect. I don’t want him to be the guy when you look at the lineup you say, ‘Oh no, I’m next to him.’ I want people to say, ‘Hey, we are lined up next to Cale, we have our work cut out for us.’”