What They Don’t Tell You Before You Becoming the Head Coach

Before you become a head coach, you think you have all the answers. “When I have my own program…”
What nobody really sits you down and walks you through are the things that will quietly make or break your program before you ever coach a practice or a regular season game. I got into this with Coach Matt Hackenberg on a recent live stream, and it's a topic worth really exploring.

So let me give you the real version.

The money situation isn’t always what you think it is.

When I got hired for my first head coaching job at 25, I was fired up. This is my program. I'm going to come in and do this, this, and this. And then one of the first things they mentioned after I was already hired was that the basketball program was $3,000 in debt. No new basketballs. No new uniforms. We can't spend a dime right now until you figure out how to dig out of this hole. That would have been nice to know in the interview process.

And it's not just about the balance in the account. The bigger question is who controls the money and how you can use it. Some schools funnel all fundraising into one big athletic pot and then disperse it evenly across programs. Ask the right questions directly before you accept anything: do I have a dedicated account, do I control what goes in and out, and do I need approval every time I want to spend something? Because you might have $20,000 sitting there and still need someone to sign off on every purchase. That's a different kind of frustrating.

The flip side is when you build it right and have that freedom, it changes everything. If you get good at fundraising and have resources to help your program, then you can really make the environment special for the players. The locker room, facilities, gear, team events, meals - all have an impact on the experience for your program.

Facilities will tell you everything about how the school values athletics.

If you get the opportunity to interview, ask to take a tour. Not the polished walkthrough they planned for you. Ask to see the coach's office. Ask to see the locker room. Ask to see the auxiliary gym and find out how often you're actually in the main gym versus the backup space. These questions matter more than you think because sometimes the answers will not match what you’ve been sold during the interview process.

My first job, we had two gyms. Sounds fine until you realize the drum line has the court three days a week and you struggle to get your freshman team on the floor, let alone run a youth practice. I've gotten into arguments with band directors the week of our sectional tournament because they had the court booked at 5:30 and they were setting up their equipment while we were still trying to run a walk-through. That is a real thing that happens.

I’ve also had a situation in which we shared a locker room with the cross country team. During their season, we couldn't even get in there. And when we did have the locker room during basketball season, we have to sometimes vacate it by 5:15 on the girls team’s game nights so visiting teams could use it. You read that right…we had to cut practice short so opponents could use our locker room. That's not something anybody brought up in the interview.

Another important thing to ask about is future plans. Are there any updates to the gym, the weight room, the locker room on the horizon? And if they've been promising those updates for three years, that's good information to have. If they're reluctant to show you around or the tour feels evasive, that's a red flag. There's probably a reason.

Administration support is not a given.

One of my coaching friends had won three or four sectional championships in a row. Program was rolling. And then a new superintendent came in and brought his son with him, a kid who had played at a different school. It was June, the team was already into shootouts, and the call came: "When's your next shootout? My son needs to play in it." The coach had never even seen the kid play. He put him out there, the kid was OK. But the kicker is then the kid stopped showing up for the rest of the summer. Never came to open gyms, never came to workouts. End of summer, coach doesn't play him in the last shootout, and the superintendent goes ballistic. Turns out the kid had been lying to his father the whole time, telling him he was going to workouts when he was really with his girlfriend. That was the first introduction this coach had to his new superintendent.

Ask about administration before you sign. Talk to other coaches in the building, not just basketball coaches. How responsive is the AD? When they make commitments, do they follow through? And find out whether your principal or your superintendent has any sports background at all. When the people above you have never coached anything, they view your program the same way they view a club or the pep band. When things get complicated and you need a decision made in your favor, that perspective matters.

Community support changes the entire job.

When I applied for a job down in southern Indiana last spring, I called every head coach in the area I could find. I wasn't calling the school and asking them how things were going. I was calling opposing coaches because they'll tell you the truth. They’ll tell you if incoming classes are weak. Or they'll say hey, those freshmen coming in could play varsity tomorrow. Those are the people who have an unbiased view of the situation you're walking into.

It's worth doing the same thing on community support. If you look around and every sport at the school is a state champion, volleyball, football, softball, then the expectation for basketball is going to match that whether you earned it yet or not. And if you're walking into a program that needs two or three years to rebuild, you may not survive long enough to do it if the community has been conditioned to expect winning right now.

Sometimes there's a reason the job is open. Sometimes a great coach saw the talent drop-off coming and got out at the right time. Sometimes there's been four coaches in six years because the place is genuinely hard to work. Winning doesn't tell the whole story either.

Not every job is a good job. The best ones are the places where the community shows up on a Tuesday night, writes checks when you put out a fundraiser, and gives you enough runway to build something real. That's the job worth hunting for. Make sure you aren’t so eager or desperate for a head coaching job that you ignore red flags.

What's something you wish someone had told you before you stepped into your first head coaching job?

I had an opportunity to sit down with coach Matt Hackenberg and discuss this topic at length on his livestream. We had a great conversation and expanded many of these topics. You can check it out here:

Where Have All the Coaches Gone?

I have been around high school basketball long enough to notice when something shifts. And lately, something has shifted. Coaches I respect, coaches who have built programs from nothing, coaches who have given decades to their schools and communities, are walking away. Retiring early. Stepping down mid-career. Taking jobs in other fields entirely. I am not sure I have ever seen this many good people leave the profession, and it has me thinking about why.

Let me be clear, I still believe high school coaching can be an incredibly meaningful job. The ability to shape young people during some of the most formative years of their lives, to teach them how to compete, how to handle failure, how to be a teammate, is genuinely valuable work. Not every player is going to the next level, but every player is going somewhere, and what they carry from their high school experience matters. I believe that deeply.

But I would be doing a disservice to this community if I pretended everything was fine.

The Year-Round Grind Is Real

High school basketball used to have an offseason. Now it has a calendar. Open gyms, AAU seasons, summer leagues, fall leagues, skill development sessions, film study, weight room supervision, and visits from college coaches have turned what was once a four-month sport into a twelve-month commitment. Coaches are not getting twelve months of pay. They are not getting twelve months of recognition. They are getting twelve months of responsibility stacked on top of a full-time job inside the building, and at some point the body and the mind start doing the math.

Burnout is not weakness. It is what happens when the demands of a job consistently outpace the support and compensation provided. We would not expect a teacher to work through June and July for the same paycheck, yet somehow we have normalized asking coaches to do exactly that.

Are Parents Different Than They Used to Be?

Most parents who get involved in their child's athletic experience mean well. I genuinely believe that. But the culture around youth and high school sports has changed, and not always for the better. The rise of social media, the increase in private training, and the false promise of college scholarships and NIL money have created an environment where some parents approach the high school coach as an obstacle rather than an advocate. Playing time disputes have always existed. What is newer is the frequency, the intensity, and the channels through which those disputes arrive. A coach in 2026 can receive a critical text message at ten o'clock on a Tuesday night from a parent who watched a Hudl clip and formed a strong opinion. That friction compounds over a season, over a career, and coaches who once loved the job start dreading Monday mornings.

Kids Are Still Worth Coaching

Here is something I want to say: I do not think kids today are fundamentally different from kids twenty years ago. They are curious, competitive, and they want to be led by someone who cares about them. What has changed is the environment they are being raised in, and that environment follows them into the gym. The attention economy, the instant gratification of social media, and a generation of parents who have sometimes shielded their children from difficulty have produced players who can be harder to reach than they used to be. That is a coaching challenge, not a reason to give up on them. But it is a coaching challenge that requires more patience, more creativity, and more emotional energy than previous generations demanded, and coaches are absorbing that cost without much acknowledgment.

The School Expects More Than It Used to

Beyond the sport itself, administrative demands placed on coaches have grown substantially. Compliance, academic monitoring, social media policies, concussion protocols (I know you love those NFHS courses!), fundraising expectations, booster club obligations, and an ever-expanding list of meetings have added hours to an already full schedule. None of those things are inherently unreasonable in isolation. Together, they represent a significant expansion of what it means to be a high school head coach, and very little of that expansion has come with additional compensation or reduced expectations elsewhere.

The Juice Has to Be Worth the Squeeze

Good coaches are not going to keep giving everything they have to programs and communities that do not prioritize keeping them. That is not cynicism; it is math. When the pay is low, the hours are long, the parents are difficult, the administration is indifferent, and the emotional toll keeps rising, talented people will eventually find somewhere else to put their energy. And when they do, it is the kids who lose.

A world with fewer good coaches is a world with fewer adults in young people's lives who teach them how to compete with class, lose without excuses, lead without ego, and show up for their teammates. That is not a small thing. That is some of the most important developmental work happening inside our schools, and it happens through people who choose to do it, usually at great personal cost.

What Has to Change

If you are an administrator, I would ask you to look honestly at what your coaches are being asked to do and whether you are backing them when it gets hard. Not blindly, not without accountability, but genuinely. Coaches who feel supported stay. Coaches who feel alone in their building do not.

If you are a parent, I would ask you to remember that your child's coach is a person who chose this work because they love the game and believe in its power to develop young people. Approach them as a partner, not an adversary. The relationship you model with that coach is the relationship your child will have with authority figures for the rest of their life.

If you are someone in the community who cares about youth sports, advocate for better compensation and better conditions for the people doing this work. Tell your school board. Show up for your coaches the way you expect them to show up for your kids.

The good news is that none of this is permanent. These are conditions that can be changed. The coaches who are walking away right now are not leaving because they stopped caring about kids or stopped caring about the game. They are leaving because they did not feel the people around them cared enough to make it sustainable. Fix that, and you keep the coaches. Keep the coaches, and you keep the culture.

That is worth fighting for.

What are you seeing in your area? Are coaches leaving at a higher rate than you have noticed in the past? What do you think is driving it?

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SLOB: Nebraska

Shared Resources: Flipping Ball Screens like Iowa

We’ve all gotten that one message from a parent that makes you pause, blink twice, and say… “Did they really just send that?”

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Let’s remind each other we’re not alone in this coaching journey.

That’s a wrap on Episode 34 of Game Shots. Thank you for subscribing.

My mission has always been, and will always be, to support coaches around the world who love the game and want to keep getting better.