This is where we’re at in high school athletics in 2017. For a multitude of reasons, be it lack of administration support, athlete parent nuisance, poor pay or burnout, coaches are keeping their day jobs but hanging up their whistles.
It makes fans (and local sportswriters) want to shout “Hey Coach, nobody needs you as a fizz-ed teacher.”
But it also stokes a curiosity about what’s gone so wrong in the high school coaching profession that some of our best local leaders are now on the freeway by 4 p.m., heading home instead of on the field building our youth into men.
Either way, this is not a good thing.
There are no winners in this struggle. Coaches who don’t coach but take up a full-time teaching position hamstring their employer’s efforts to find another coach who actually wants to coach. Administrations who look at sports as an afterthought and have coaches on one-year contracts are shooting their schools in the foot, but predictably don’t seem to care.
What you have in the end is frustration on both sides because of a domino effect that is starting to prove damaging for both sides. El Monte currently has THREE former varsity football head coaches on campus holding staff positions, but its football program is coach-less. More on that Friday when I look deeper into the El Monte situation.
“It’s the worst situation,” said a local athletic director, who asked to remain nameless. “The inability to be able to hire somebody in that spot is a killer when you have a guy on staff that could coach there, but he’s just choosing not to. What it forces you to do is take walk-ons.”
Ahh yes, the walk-on head coach. When was the last time you saw that work in football? There are outliers, but mostly it’s a losing proposition. Being a varsity football head coach these days requires around-the-clock attention and availability.
Technically, the coaches don’t owe it to their employer to remain coaches. A tenured teacher who held a coaching position can tell the school to kick rocks as far as the side-gig is concerned and there’s nothing the school can do about it.
Back in the day, it used to be that almost every fizz-ed teacher held at least one coaching position. Even athletic directors were expected to coach a sport in addition to their duties. There has been a disconnect in recent years, however.
In the case of someone like Maggiore, he put more into West Covina than he’ll ever get out. You can say that about a lot of other coaches, too. And that says nothing of all the family or personal time that’s lost in the process.
You can’t blame coaches for feeling squeezed. They either keep up with the growing demands of the job or risk falling behind in the win-loss column. Yet the money stays the same and not enough administrators seem to understand this.
So what’s the solution? Coaches and athletic directors contacted for this story all said there isn’t one. Not one! They’re all lucky I’m here. At no point has the answer been so obvious. Varsity football head coach needs to become a full-time job of its own.
No more teaching job by day and then coaching at night. No more leaving one but keeping the other. Just one straight-up position. The coach wants to leave, he leaves everything. That’s it. That’s the only answer. There isn’t going to be a happy medium the way things are or the way they’re going.
It would require some work for the state. It may even require some creativity in an industry (education) that’s badly lacking it. But in the end, it would save a lot of time and headaches and the flagship sport for any school and its community would reap the award.
If superintendents can make a quarter-million dollars or more a year, believe me there’s money somewhere to pay for a full-time football head coach at every public school. And if football isn’t your school’s thing, then pick the sport that is and give him or her the coaching-only gig.
Now that would be a good thing.
