The Top 5 Reasons Coaches are Considering Quitting

College coaches are at an interesting - yet troubling - time in the history of the coaching profession.?

The post-pandemic era has inspired professionals across all industries to ponder if what they've always done is still what they want to be doing.?

What I am about to share with you and the impact it could have will be strictly based on whether or not you believe I am an authority in this field. Coaches can be viewed as both heroes and villains for a variety of reasons,so depending upon which one you automatically assign, the receipt of this information will vary in response. If you are not a coach or have never been in college athletics setting in any form, please do not waste your time in attempting to debate me.

From where I sit, many coaches are seeking refuge in opening up their own sports-related businesses or entering industries that have nothing to do with athletics. The escape is warranted as they seek refuge from the constant judgment, the preaching, the anonymous student-athlete surveying, and expanding job descriptions on top of shrinking resources. I can't blame them and I don't, but before you sign that letter of resignation, give this a read and first acknowledge this fact.

Coaches are tired.?

Why do I say that? Because most of my Fearless network is made up of coaches who tell me they are on the verge of hanging it up. The extermination of our top and longest-running coaches isn't coming - it's already here.?

From the outside, coaching probably seems like a cushy gig. Our biggest critics typically tend to draw from those who have been exposed to lower-level versions of college or pro coaches the media shows them. We are often depicted on the sidelines, yelling, holding our whistle as we crush spirits and demand sprints be completed.

Not all of us are unmonitored control freaks.The majority who seek to do good are seldom the ones making the headlines unless they coach college football or basketball with a film crew who follows them around just in case they have a catchy phrase or speech to post on social. That particular group included, the coaches I associate with are more likely to be the people that think the stereotypical whistle-yielding coach is a pure idiot.?

Enter any college campus and you are?likely to find our coaches walking the grounds of our universities, speaking about opportunities (social, educational, and of course, athletic). As we cover our turf and share what our institutions offer, we discuss the ways the athletes will have the opportunity to grow and develop within our programs. All the while, most of us who are not men and coach in non-revenue sports will be defending and fighting for our programs behind closed doors.?Despite our best efforts, I see so much of what we are trying to do fading quicker than any of us can possibly conceive.

Defending what we do and how we do it has become exhausting.

Many of us will leave at the end of this school year?and some will leave before the season is over. It’s not because we are not good at what we do, but because we simply do not have the space for a fight anymore.?

What has led to this fatigue and our rapidly lowering levels of tolerance for the "norm" behaviors in athletics? I am sure if you are a coach you can think of more than a few topics to talk with your colleagues about over coffee at your sport-specific conventions.

Allow me to break it down into 5 bullets

1. Yes, the pandemic was/is awful, but it's being blamed for all the ways higher ed and athletics were in the toilet before the pandemic.?

If you are one of those people fully blaming the pandemic for all of the athlete woes, you are not alone.?

I was actually one of those - until recently -? when I met with my child's preschool teacher for a conference. We discussed how many numbers and letters she was recalling on her own and I mentioned the damage of the pandemic and how it's affected our college students. My daughter's, underpaid, salt-of-the-earth preschool teacher looked at me and said, "Yes, the pandemic was awful. But, we had so many issues brewing in our children long before COVID that we just didn't want to face and our isolation simply accelerated that."

My jaw sat neatly on the floor as I thought about the years leading up to the pandemic and the conversations about athlete depression, anxiety, body dysphoria, identity, cutting, eating disorders, and every other issue that was just brewing in the background. My daughter's preschool teacher was right even though I didn't want her to be. As more time and space are put between us and COVID, it has me wondering how long we can sustain the blame on it. Don't get me wrong, the COVID generation of children will have all kinds of studies on their behavioral patterns in the next 20 years that will be obvious content for a Netflix special. However, if you want to be part of the solution, let's work on slowly taking accountability for what is in front of us rather than only dwelling on what is in the rearview mirror.?

2. Too many administrators who have never coached are in leadership positions.

I have been a long term resident in the neighborhood of speaking out against hiring administrators who have no coaching experience. In 2016 I tweeted about it followed by my predictions on the effects of the mass hiring of development or admin-only people as leaders in athletics. Seems you all didn't listen then and here we are. The pandemic bears absolutely no responsibility for these bonehead hiring practices, which are completely based on human decisions.?

Coupled with poor hiring decisions, we continue to send our industry into flux with increased athlete complaints plus the ever-present demand to produce wins at all costs. This, divided by less athlete emotional stability and shrinking resources, equals one big circular set of problems.?

With this formula, along with the athletes calling the shots and actively re-classifying basic standards of fitness and accountability as abuse, we are socially engineering ourselves into a new corner from which there is no exit. Administrators on the whole are perpetually stuck in an old-school way of management. We would all be fired if we managed our teams the way many of our collegiate leadership manages its coaches.

"We would all be fired if we managed our teams the way our collegiate leadership manages its coaches."

Athletics is desperate to hold on to the ancient corporate hierarchy way of doing things. The pace at which we operate today is so fast that superior athletic admins addressing critical issues can be conveniently sorted into what I call the "email abyss".?

You know that important email you sent to your boss. It’s the one that never gets answered, is never discussed, and conveniently evaporates. That email didn't disappear and it was delivered and is solely responsible for why your admin dodges you in the hallway in a fit of awkwardness.

If your administrator wanted to address it, they would, but they have full rights to ignore it under the guise of fear that they might say what they want to say and get themselves in trouble. Rather than address that kind of behavior, it's simple, time-saving for them, and normal by their standards.?

Keep this in mind the next time you bring up an issue that magically never gets resolved and is relegated to the abyss. This has somehow become socially acceptable behavior and it should not be, but athletics is especially versed in the usage of the abyss.?

With a sense of entitlement to closed-door meetings, administrators are able to largely dismiss the existing issues of their coaches/employees, and only until it's an issue for management might they engage.?

Neglecting communication in changes of policies that are created by those whom those policies have zero effect on in the day-to-day operations is now common practice. The "team atmosphere" in athletics is a fun thing to talk about in virtual staff meetings, but it has largely become a mirage.?

Elevating in-house personnel to vacancies or doubling up on duties to save money have created smaller inner admin circles that stifle the concept of new ideas or solutions. This is a prime breeding ground for the growth and nurturing of the "this is the way we have always done it" policy to live.?

Business and development people are fundraisers who shake hands and raise capital, not proven departmental leaders.?

This one-sided goal solution in hiring does not solve the existing problems amongst teams, parents, and toxic environments. This is where our athletic departments are drowning.?

3. We've deleted essential terms from our athletic vocabulary and it's debilitating

Ten years ago, athletic fitness was seen as paramount to operating safely within the sphere of sport. Fitness was a definitive mechanism in sports that could not be argued. Fitness involved stats, results, and tangible evidence that you either did or did not do your work. You either made your time or you didn't. All of those gatekeepers and excel spreadsheets were able to be used as metrics for creating goals and seeing progress as a positive thing. The connotation we have placed now on fitness and the elimination of the conversations coaches are permitted to have is drastically tearing at and changing the fabric of our team standards.?

The idea that you were required to be fit was a normal expectation has morphed into a conversation that has literally eliminated using words indicative of fitness for fear of legal terms showing up in the narrative.??

The term "fitness" was not viewed as "body shaming" or as I like to call it, the new taboo word in women's sports, which suggests if an athlete is told they are not fit enough to compete in their sport safely, the coach is branded a bully. Being fit is part of sport and always will be. As the coach of a full contact sport, being unfit can hurt an athlete and their teammates. The active elimination of benchmarks in athletics that states you must achieve this level of fitness in order to achieve this level of opportunity is disappearing.?

How did we get here??

We got here because schools are too busy hiring their new name, image, and likeness experts to help student-athletes with their personal brand rather than meaningful resources that teach them how to get through the day without being crippled by anxiety and worry.?

We have rushed to hire sports psychologists who, along with administrative support, often close off all communication with their coaching staff. This practice offers another pathway for the athlete to avoid the interactive process that had previously challenged - but also strengthened - the coach-athlete relationship.?

Competition, training, and the most mundane tasks that are required to participate in college athletics at even the lowest levels are now agonizing for our young people to manage because they have had zero practice.?

Before your rebuttal includes that some of this evolution in our athletic language is helpful, I don't disagree.?

I certainly have no issue outlawing some of the things my coaches said to our teams when I played sports. However, what is the ceiling for this and when does it become detrimental to not only the athlete, but your entire program and the trust they need to have in you to tell them the truth??

Athletes want fairness which is and should be delivered. However, fitness standards are absorbing the top hits in this conversation and coaches are increasingly frustrated with trying to maintain some semblance of a standard across the board.?

Along with fitness is navigating the conversations about mental and emotional wellness. Helping athletes over the hurdles of their raging self-doubt is an ongoing battle. The expectations for their own perfection to arrive without putting any of the extra work in to even come close to aligning with that expectation is rampant.?

If you are a college coach beating your head against the wall in how to motivate athletes into changing unhealthy patterns of behavior, allow me to remind you that they were exposed to their family structures, peers, youth, high school, and club sports for 18 years prior to arriving to you. While most of us recognize that this is not all on us, no one else is taking the brunt of the responsibility but us.?

4. The vast majority of the public has no idea what college coaches do … at. all.

I'm enrolled in law school.

My cohorts are always fascinated by the stories from athletics. To them, it's a whole new world that makes its own rules, ignores the rights of its employees, and/or conditions them to feel powerless enough to never question the system. Those who do, get punished, ostracized, or eliminated.?

In one class, one of my cohorts made reference to the "enormous salaries and contracts" of college coaches. When I shared that 87.5% of us do not make millions with the majority of my colleagues in the college space being at-will employees on 1-year or no contracts, they were shocked. The assumption that all coaches are on the same payroll enjoying the same resources and recruiting like celebrities in luxury private planes is exhausting to explain to those outside our profession. If you are a coach in a non-revenue sport know you are lucky to have an announcer at your competition and even luckier if they pronounce any of your athlete's names correctly in front of a home crowd on senior day. We dream more about this than ever seeing a salary bump.?

Despite this not being the reality for the majority of us coaches, we are also actively experiencing our extinction by way of the court of social media.?

The Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter posts of athletes coming out of the woodwork to bury coaches on their experiences is a train that universities have no desire to stop or even discuss. The general public assumes those outcry posts are a complete picture of the facts while the majority of coaches read those complaints and know there is context, documentation, and an endless number of meetings to prove otherwise.?

The catch is, the social media complaint system in athletics only works one way where the student can spout off and coaches cannot or are instructed not to defend themselves or fight back. If you do, you can prepare to suffer at the hands of your end-of-season surveys, which is a whole other branch of dysfunction the athletic industry is just running away with.?

Student-athlete survey companies are making bank off institutions too lazy to assess their own environments as a whole. The practice of pinning the entirety of one athlete's experience on one coach is an easier solution than doing any work to really improve the ecosystems of athletics.?

Universities and colleges are largely unwilling to look at all the ways they fall short in service, relationships, and resources for their regular student population and it's no different for athletes. This lack of ownership over the disconnect has given athletes the power to say anything and everything they want with zero responsibility to supply evidence, context, or even a level of maturity to have a face-to-face conversation. An athlete who repeatedly fails their sport-related physical fitness test has free reign to call their coach an abusive monster because they are not in the starting lineup.?

Schools paying survey companies to gather opinions of their athletes offer an anonymity that completely eliminates the opportunity for communication, problem-solving, and dare I say it, compassion for imperfection.?

No one should ever ask or expect athletes to be perfect because that's not what we do as coaches, but you are damned if you aren't perfect as a coach.?

I am all for anonymity in reporting serious issues amongst staffing, but I see very little benefit to offering an outlet for entire libraries of year-long grievances being quietly inventoried by athletes and then dropped on coaches at the end of the year with no support or opportunity to respond.?

This is pure madness and universities and administrators are an accessory to the disappearance of having to be accountable for the accusations being hurled at coaches daily.?

5. Athletic Administrators do not understand basic employment law and they break it - daily.?

This is the big one.?

A countless number of coaches I work with slog through the minutiae of their own dysfunctional athletic department and often share egregious scenarios as "normal" in daily operations. I routinely respond that what their department officials are doing (or not doing) is not only disturbing, but also illegal.

Like clockwork, the first response I get from college coaches is, "Well, even if it's illegal, I can't say anything or I will lose my job."?

This is horrifying to hear, but the reality is that those coaches are right.?

They will lose their jobs - and here’s where it’s infuriating - not because it is legal for their university to fire them for lodging a complaint about working conditions or treatment of their student-athletes, but because athletics does what it wants when it wants and most coaches walk away quietly.?

The other side of campus is often completely in the dark about the levels to which their athletic departments stick together to cover and document or omit the truth.?

Athletic departments may claim to be just one part of the institution, but anyone working in it knows it operates on its own island. This is what makes it all so dangerous. When this brand of isolation fosters the ability for employers and admins to create open fear in the department, it creates a whole new level that beats the pants off anything shady they may be practicing at the corporate levels.?

Despite there being a massive presence of retaliatory behavior in athletics for coaches speaking up on Title IX or Title VII, human resources are often completely clueless about what goes on across campus.?

Often in these scenarios, by the time human resources get involved, rather than there being a fair investigation to determine who was harmed and why, the conversation then becomes, “How do we legally get rid of this coach?”

Coaches, this is not the way it's supposed to work.?

Out of the 5 bullets, this one is the most crucial, and education on this topic has the potential to protect and prolong your existence in this industry. This education can be broken down into simple terms to arm yourself with a firmer understanding of the environmental trends in athletic department culture.?

It's easy to read a blog like this and believe you have enough information but why not take it a step further and engage?

Join me on May 7th, 2023 at 6-7:30 pm CST hosted by @MollyGrisham for our Legal Literacy in College Coaching Webinar. THIS EVENT HAS PASSED.

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