Terry Rogers is executive director of the Georgia Athletic Coaches Association, which has more than 6,000 members who coach football and other sports and is the oldest association of its kind in the country. He also served at his alma mater, Union County High, as football coach and athletic director for 36 years.
Back in the day, it was more common to see a coach stay in one place. Today, we see coaches getting out of the profession a lot earlier. Coaches are changing careers or retiring. The economy, furloughs, loss of staff, no increase in pay (supplements) — all of those are factors.
This profession offers very little family time to the coach. In summer, coaches have the weight room open four days a week and hold passing leagues two nights a week, even before practice starts.
Expectations are greater now, and sometimes these are not realistic. A school will expect more out of a coach than what can be done. A coach gets in that situation and then he gets out.
Coaches also leave because they don’t have support from administrators. Coaching is a tough profession. A lot of parents have higher expectations of their children athletically than what the kids are capable of producing. The parents then blame the coach. There are a lot of opinions about the coach, and he needs to have strong backing from administrators.
Head coaches leave because they lose assistants. Say the assistant coach leaves, and the administration say they can’t afford to replace him. The team gets understaffed, and the head coach will leave for somewhere he can have a bigger staff.
Sometimes you have a great coach, but it’s not a good fit with the community. A community has a personality, just like people do. We also lose high school coaches to college programs. They are in demand because they turn out so many great players, compared to other states. We are the No. 1 per-capita producer of college football players in the country.
Some coaches leave because they want a different location, either in or out of a metro area, in the mountains or the coast. The most common reason for that is to return home, to where they grew up.
Coaches will always move to chase that neon rainbow — the state championships. They move to where they feel they have a better chance of winning.
For coaches who may be thinking of leaving, I think you’re better off if you stay and try to survive. It is, however, much harder to do that today than 1971.
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