Movies always show three types of coaches. The coach who is a genius. They have a good job as a coach, they show up in a shirt and tie and they know what they are doing and they lead the team. This is by and large the Football/Basketball/Baseball coach and the movie is about the coach, not the athlete. Think Friday Night Lights or Coach Carter.
The second kind of coach applies to the coach who does not know what he is doing. It’s the coaches from the movie Win Win or Ted Lasso. They have a job, usually unrelated to the sport. They might have never done the sport or were terrible at it. They take over the program and through sheer charisma of letting athletes do what they do, they create a great and winning team.
The last type of coach is the has been picked by an ambitious and talented player. They seek the mentor of the best, and they end up talking in the reluctant coach into doing something they swore to never do. This coach might be an alcoholic, without a job, has not coached or done the sport in many years, but somehow they are the genius that helps the true hero of the story. They somehow work for free for the athlete and get them to the podium, to be forgotten, because in the end, it was the athlete, not the coach who did it all.
This dynamic is wrong on many levels because it doesn’t actually work like this in real life. In real life coaches in most sports are the type one coaches. They run an organization. They administer a budget, the fundraise, they run a staff of assistants. They interact with the athletes, the other coaches, administrators and parents. They put on camps and tournaments that requires hundreds of moving parts. They watch film, they plan out the season, organize rides, watch the student grades, help students through tough times at home and at school. They worry non stop about making the program better, individuals better, developing athletes and coaches. They interact with alumni, manage equipment and fundraise. They worry about the season and off-season and all of this, if they are a high school coach, for less than $5000 in pay and less than $1500 in pay as a Middle School Coach.
As a wrestling coach I have seen the stark difference between the work load of an assistant coach and head coach. As an assistant coach the extent of my work was showing up to practice, sometimes helping plan practice, doing film and going to matches. As the head coach, I suddenly had responsibility over the entire program. I had to recruit coaches, recruit wrestlers, keep wrestlers, develop the training regiment, inform parents and wrestlers, keep track of equipment and fundraise. In my first year it was easy enough, a JV and Varsity team with only 18 wrestlers, two managers and three coaches. Today we not only have a girls and boys JV, Freshmen. andVarsity, but we also have a kids, Middle School and adult programs with a total of over 110 athletes and all of their parents (except adults). We now have a staff of over eleven coaches and five managers. We put on camps for kids, middle schoolers and high school students and two tournaments a year. Our budget went from $3,000 to over $20,000 per year to pay for the additional tournaments, equipment and clinics to bring the best professionals while also compensating the additional coaches given that district only provides four stipends regardless of the size of the team.
Now we are not a championship team (yet), but we are working on it. However, every championship team is run by a program this complex. It has a feeder program, it puts on tournaments, it has a large coach staff and a large pool of athletes. It takes a certain type of person with a certain type of organizational skills to run a program like that. A wrestling coach has to be there for two hours of practice, plan the practice, clean the mats, watch the film, write the emails, organize the week and season, communicate with the team and parents. And all of this is done in spare time as the coach has to have a full time job to pay for their living expenses and family since high schools do not provide a living wage to compensate for all this time, while also holding very high expectations.
To run a good program like this requires a lot of sacrifices on the part of the family. Our popular culture simplifies the effort and dedication that coaches put in to the athletes. The amount of positives that athletes get from sports can not be quantified in dollars, especially given that vast majority of parents never pay for the sports that their kids do as part of Middle School or High School programs.
On top of it, the coaches are rarely recognized for the managerial and organizational skills. All of these skills don’t go on a resume because they don’t come with the pay that values that level of work. It would have value if the headline or title was any other except for “Head Coach”. But it should. And maybe it did, prior to the way that pop-culture showed coaches and sports.
not-rushin 