A LETTER TO THE PEOPLE WHO HIRE US
I want to be upfront about something before I get into this one. I do not have all the answers here, and I am not the expert on fixing a problem this size. What I have is experience, two decades of it, in this profession, and that experience has given me some strong opinions. I try to back those opinions up with research where I can find it, and I am willing to disagree with research too, when my own experience tells me something different. These are my thoughts and observations. Take them for what they are.
I am currently reading Adam Grant's Hidden Potential, and I came across a study I have not stopped thinking about. Researchers found they could predict how much money a student would earn as an adult based on nothing more than how experienced their kindergarten teacher was. Moving a student from an inexperienced kindergarten teacher to an experienced one added over $1,000 to that student's annual income in their twenties. Across a class of twenty kids, that is $320,000 in additional lifetime earnings, from one teacher, in one year, before those kids could even read. I read that passage and feel that coaches have the potential to provide the same impact.
The Second Most Influential Job in the Building
More than 8.2 million students played high school sports in the U.S. last year, an all-time record. A high school coach has the potential to spend four straight years with a kid, some of the most formative years of that kid's life. A kindergarten teacher spends about 180 days with a class, but for those days, it is all day. Grades K through 4 are probably where a child spends the most concentrated time with a single teacher. But the high school years matter just as much, in a different way. A coach who has a player from ninth grade through senior year can leave a tremendous impact, positive or negative. That is an important job to hold.
If that is true, or even close to true, it raises a question I cannot get past. Why are we not spending more time developing the people in that second job?
As I have written about before, when I ran a youth basketball league, my mission was simple. I did not want to be a reason a kid never played basketball again. High school is a little different, because you are almost always going to have more kids try out than roster spots, which means coaches often have to cut players to trim a team down. As an athletic administrator, I want to see as many students as possible playing varsity sports, and that means schools need coaches who can support junior varsity and freshman teams too. That takes more coaches, not fewer, which makes the shortage even more of a problem.
I think society is lacking good coaches. Many of the coaches I grew up around are retiring. What does the next generation of coaches look like? We have to keep focusing on growing the next generation of leaders in this profession.
We are competitive, and of course we coach to win. But winning depends on building a culture that the people under our charge can actually thrive in. And building that kind of culture depends on us continuing to grow as coaches ourselves, and wanting to get better.
As for whether a teacher or a coach has the greater impact, I actually believe a coach has the ability to have the greater impact, simply because of the amount of time involved. But impact really comes down to relationships, which is why you can never say definitively which role matters more. A coach who genuinely wants to get better will almost always have an impact on their players.
What I Have Seen Firsthand
I do not believe the schools I have been part of have done enough to develop their coaches. No mentor program for someone new to the job. No training beyond a rules meeting and a concussion protocol. Federal funding for teacher development will probably never trickle down to coach development in the same way, so if this is going to change, it likely has to be something schools and athletic departments choose to prioritize on their own.
I do not think that gap is intentional or malicious. I think it comes from a misunderstanding of what the job actually is. Game tactics and strategy matter, and I am not suggesting otherwise. But players do not care what we know until they know we care. Almost nobody sits a new coach down and tells them the real job is teaching character, building trust, and learning to communicate with a sixteen-year-old in a way that actually reaches him. Coaches learn schemes because schemes are what we assume the job requires. Nobody ever tells us the job is bigger than that.
It is important for a head coach to know the sport they are coaching, but they also have to surround themselves with a coaching staff that is strong on the technical side of the game and capable of supporting the development of the student-athletes themselves. Administrators need to do everything they can to give coaches real avenues to develop, the same way they already do for teachers.
I fully believe players do not care how much you know, how many titles you have, or how many games you have won, until they know you care about them as individuals. That is when special teams get built.
Are We Getting the Most Out of the People We Lead?
Underneath all of this is a bigger question, one that goes beyond whether a school offers coach development. It is about whether those of us already in leadership positions, athletic directors, head coaches, administrators, are actually doing the work ourselves.
Are we sitting down with each of our coaches and actually hearing from them, not just handing down expectations? Are we listening to what they need, not just what we need from them? Are we equipping our player leaders, our captains, with what they actually need to lead, or are we just handing them a title and hoping it works itself out? Are we adjusting how we lead based on who we are actually leading, the same way we would adjust an offense based on our personnel? Whatever level of leadership any of us sit at, are we getting the most out of the people we are tasked with leading, or are we assuming they will figure it out the way we had to?
I believe athletics is one of the most important parts of the four-year high school experience, for the millions of kids who go through it. If that is true, the adults leading that experience deserve the same investment we give the adults leading a classroom. I do not have the fix for this. I just cannot stop asking the question.
So I will leave it here, for anyone in a position to do something about it. If a good teacher is worth that much to a child's future, what do you think a good coach is worth, and what are you doing to develop the ones you already have?
— Kevin
