In sports, and football in particular there are different levels of coaching. This positioning is generally based upon how much experience you have and at times your availability.
For instance, there are three sections of NCAA football – Division I, Division II and Division III with DI being regarded as the highest in regards to player talent. (Also this group of schools like Michigan State, Rutgers and Alabama have the most resources to allocate to athletics).
Almost every coach when they are younger wants to attain a high level for various reasons. You get to work with some very talented players, coach with knowledgeable peers and of course there is the chance to play in front of large crowds and many times compete on television.
Obviosly there is a lot of glamor involved – plus there can be a great deal of money involved (especially amongst the head coaches).
****Please note – there is a great deal of pressure for the guys at the highest levels. This year we have seen many guys get “whacked” (fired) already and the season isn’t even into it’s final stage yet. ( My good friend at Texas El Paso – Sean Kugler resigned a few weeks ago, Jim McElwain was fired earlier this week at Florida, Hugh Freeze at Mississippi didn’t even make it to the season due to his mistakes with his school phone.). But when you get paid a lot you face a great deal of scrutiny.
I assure you more firings are on the way!
Guess what happens when they fire the top guy – yup the assistants will generally all get their walking papers at the end of the season. You can be a great coach, but you are probably out of work with no more insurance or pay checks coming in – off to try and find another job!****
One question that is always asked by young coaches – how do you get started? How do I get to be like David Shaw (head coach at Stanford) or Jim Mora (head coach at UCLA) or even Bill Belichick the five time Super Bowl winning coach of the New England Patriots? How did they start out?
Well, first of there are no guarantees….each path to the upper echelon jobs is a little different – yet they are also similar. But many coaches have worked their way thru the “system” and never make it into what would be called a “Big-Time” job. Many coaches never attain a job of a coordinator much less become head coaches.
Often coaches aspire to find their way into high level jobs, only to find they cannot break into those positions. Sometimes it is just lack of experience, sometimes the wrong experience, and other times it is as simple as being in the wrong place when a job becomes available.
Like I said earlier it is not an exact science and often the trail has a lot of distractions and detours. For instance you might find an opportunity on the opposite coast.
Wow seems romantic glamorous even. ….speaking of romance – maybe you find that interesting job in State “X” but the pay is low and your significant other says…..I have a job here making much more money than that and if I move to state “X” I have no guarantee of a job there! Well deceisions – hard decisions have to be made.
Maybe that nice job shows up when you are a HS coach with ten years experience and a district pension plan…plus a family and two kids. Explain to your wife you are giving up that nice house and security to take on a lower pay and a much riskier job at a college – just to pursue your dream of a full time coaching job with no teaching. Guess how that conversation is going to go down?
So I might as well tell my own little story.
My personal path was a lot easier – albeit without any guarantees either. After two years of coaching as an unpaid volunteer (with my close friend Scot Dapp) at Kutztown State I finally caught what was the eventual “break”.
***Scot and I were both school teachers and that is how we made our living….we showed up at Kutztown to coach football every day after our school day ended.***
After two years of typing about ten resumes per week and mailing them to every school in the NCAA that I could think of I got a call from a coach looking for some help. By the way no computers or spell check in the mid seventies so those resume’s took a lot of time to type on my old Olivetti Underwood!). …..In case you don’t know there are a lot of schools in the NCAA. I finally got ONE SINGLE response.
I was able to secure a graduate assistant position at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico (“The Land of Enchantment”). To this day I love the place because of the people and friends I made there….and just the experience of living there. (AND NO – New Mexico is not NEW and it is not in MEXICO – it is one of the 50 states!)
My mother could not understand how I could give up my elementary school teaching job of $11,000 per year (that was a fair salary in 1977 by the way) to take a job that paid $300 per month. Also to travel to the great southwest where I knew no one and had no connections??!!
My girlfriend had also dumped me and it didn’t look like she was coming back and she was smart enough not to – so I was out the door and on my way across the Mississippi River for the first time in my life. No worries – single man with no baggage. So I started out pretty much without having to worry about anything but coaching football and having fun (I am good at that fun thing by the way.)
A year later I was fortunate to get a full-time job at Arizona State which was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me. First of all I was like the fourth choice for the job (My Boss at the time Darryl Rogers -always introduced me to other people…..”Don was our fourth choice but he is ours now and hey we love him!”) I worked with DR for ten years and believe me he introduced me to MANY people over that time span.
I was lucky in many ways – first – I had just the right amount of experience to do the job, also just enough to keep my salary reasonable, second – a few other fools turned down the job, third – I could get to Arizona State more quickly than anyone else by driving six hours from Las Cruces to Phoenix, fourth – the fools at the NCAA hadn’t yet implemented a rule which prevented a coach from working on the field and also serving as the strength coach (ASU wanted someone who could do two things – that was the versatile me!).
I was able to more than triple my teaching salary and move to a fantastic but very hot southwestern city – Phoenix. Coach in the PAC-10 (Unlike the Big 10 which has 14 teams – we can you count our teams in the PAC-12 – there are 12). Single man with cash in a college town – look out!
Five years later I was coaching in Detroit with Darryl Rogers – still introducing me as his “Fourth” choice by the way! A few decades later sitting at Moravian writing this silly blog.
But, that is kind of one path into a full-time coaching position.
In reality the clearest entry way to a full time coaching job is through a job as a graduate assistant coach. They are hard to come by as I have already mentioned. But I am pretty sure that finding a grad assistant job now is much harder that when I started out.
As a grad assistant you are offered free graduate level classes, a small stipend to cover your expenses and housing. (Did I mention SMALL stipend??). In return you get to begin coaching in a college setting. You begin on the bottom rung of the college football coaching.
***At smaller schools like Moravian we have internships which are the same idea.***
Trust me – although becoming a GA is a right of passage that almost everyone in college coaching goes thru….it can be a very trying experience. I really enjoyed my experience because the majority of the “Full time” coaches and how they taught me and brought me into their families.
I was a GA at New Mexico State and I can’t begin to thank the men (who were the major coaches on the NMSU staff) I learned football from – Don Christiansen, Fred Graves and Tony DiBiasse and these men also brought me into their families. Don’s son Steve and I remain great friends – Tony and his wife Martha had dinner with me every time the Lions played in Cincinnati….Fred and I coached again with the Lions. Awesome people.
But in some colleges the primary or full-time coaches treat the GA’s as their personal assistants giving them a variety of tedious jobs in the office – sometime involving coaching and other times just using them to run around campus taking care of jobs they should be handling themselves.
Other times they treat you like dirt and just run over the top of you. This behavior is pretty much tolerated and the GA just has to take it because these are the guys who will be recommending you for jobs later.
Every GA has their story about someone who treated them badly along the way. Some coach who gave them a thankless “shit” job that you don’t even get a thank you for. Yet you press on because you want to get one of those coveted full time jobs. Just shut up and remember not to treat anyone like you were treated!
There were four of us GA’s at New Mexico State during my time. We developed a strong bond as our head coach Gil Krueger treated us like his personal dogs. We stuck together and helped each other with some of the shitty jobs he threw at us.
I might have been handed the shittiest job of the GA’s….but it was also the funniest in my opinion. It taught me very little about coaching football, but it did teach me to laugh at myself and realize that I was just a regular guy and not some high flying college football coach.
I was in charge of the player’s laundry. In other words I was to make sure that after our practices all the t shirts, jocks, pants, jerseys etc were cleaned and dried for the next practice. Shouldn’t have been a hard job. BUT – a big BUT!
BUT we had no laundry equipment on campus. We had to take all of that wet, sweaty, smelly gear three miles downtown into Las Cruces and wash and dry it there. I was in charge of it….but I had an assistant.
I had a football player who was injured to take care of the laundry. He kept his scholarship by taking care of the gear. I will never forget Dee Taylor – I’m sure he doesn’t remember me – but I will always remember him.
Well, after a few days Dee stopped coming to work. The laundry stayed wet and dirty one day. I complained to Gil Krueger – the head coach – that Dee did not show up.
Gil Krueger told me that if the kid wasn’t doing it….well I had to do it! Actually Gil said this: ” I don’t give a fu*k about Dee Taylor and I don’t give a fu*k about you – get the job done or get the fu*k out of here.”
Those are pretty much his words verbatim….well I looked at my life and where I wanted to go….pretty much knew I didn’t want to turn out like Gil Krueger but knowing I wanted to coach football. So I shut up and got busy.
So for the entire season I cleaned and dried the laundry for our 100 or so players.
I would wake up at 4:30 in the morning get into a white 1956 Chevrolet Apache panel truck with no front seat or windshield wipers and take the four or five duffel bags of laundry downtown to a laundromat.
My front seat was a 10 gallon carpet glue can with a piece of foam on it. Didn’t need the windshield wipers because it rarely rained in the southern New Mexico desert.
The owner of the Laundromat met me each morning and gave me a stack of quarters and I proceeded to place the laundry into ten or so washing machines and get them going with the quarters. Then after 45 minutes loaded them into the dryers and finished my job. Every day of the season I did the team’s laundry.
Sometimes I did the laundry in the evenings and had to jostle with some locals and NMSU students for the machines. Actually met some good friends, met a few girls that I dated….but the best thing there was a bar across the street where I drank a lot of beer those evenings.
The final week of the season I drove the three miles to the do the laundry in an all out downpour! If my friends could have seen the big-time football coach driving that panel truck with his head sticking out of the front window just to see in a driving rainstorm.
But it really all paid off in my opinion – kept my head from getting to big and met some lifelong friends.
But, let’s get to our GA’s – or interns – as they are called here at MOCO.
They are all great young guys who have a really good chance to move on to find bigger jobs.
First off you have to understand – our interns are truly not interns or graduate assistants. In the situation we are working with at Moravian these guys are basically full-time coaches. They do everything that any one of us older guys do. Actually I do less work than they do – I am in charge of drawing the cards for our scout teams. That’s pretty easy to do.
These guys have to coach a group of guys at their position. They also have to run meetings and handle problems that come about on campus. It is not an easy thing to do for a young man who was wearing helmet and pads just a year ago.
We need these guys to be on there game and we count on them to be professional.
Arturo Gyles and Evan Harvey were standouts at Lehigh and work on the defensive side of the ball. Matt Chiappelli (Shippensberg) and Doug Turrell (Villanova) work for the offense.
They are all competent and capable guys who will be very good as full time coaches somewhere if they hand with the profession. They also are really gregarious and each very personable.
***I am teaching them how to drink Beer!!!***
To say there is teasing between them in the office – well that is an understatement. Especially in the week where Villanova and Lehigh played each other early in the season. Quite a few barbs thrown around – the testosterone ramped up etc.
But, that is actually a daily thing now. Always ragging on each other. But, I promise you these guys have gotten really close and will always be friends as they move through their careers.
One of the funniest pranks pulled off within their group was by Doug – he invented the “Intern of the Week” award. Obviously there is no such thing. But he placed a placard on Evan’s bulletin board declaring that Doug was the “Intern of the Week.”
Well, a few of us spotted this placard and decided to intercede a little. We found a picture of Doug to add to the award. It was a “Leave it to Beaver” type shot of a young Doug Turrell from perhaps his freshman year at Nova. We inked in a front tooth and added it to the bulletin board with the “Intern of the Week” tag. Nice touch if you ask me.
So Evan, Matt and Arturo had a good laugh about the “Intern of the Week” idea. But we all found it even more hilarious when Doug walked in the office and saw we added his picture to the award. Just one of those quid pro quo moments that had us laughing at each other.
It might not seem all that funny to many people. But at one o’clock in the morning when you are all working in close quarters with some pressure hanging over your head….it is really funny.
I have no doubt that if these guys stick with it they will become fantastic coaches and perhaps even head coaches!
What a Life!