The mistake I made early on
When I first stepped into athletic administration, I thought my job was mostly logistics. Scheduling games, booking officials, making sure buses showed up on time. If the calendar worked, I figured the department worked.
That view held up for about a season. Then I noticed something. Teams with the same resources, the same facilities, even similar talent, were performing at completely different levels. Some had kids who showed up early and stayed late. Others had kids who treated practice as an inconvenience between classes. The difference wasn’t the schedule. It was the culture I hadn’t been paying enough attention to.
What I thought mattered most
I used to believe that hiring a strong coach solved everything. Get someone who knows the X’s and O’s, who has a winning record, and the rest takes care of itself. I’ve since changed my mind about that.
A coach with a great record can still run a program where kids feel anxious, disconnected, or afraid to make mistakes. I’ve seen talented coaches leave a locker room worse than they found it. What actually predicts whether a program will hold together over years, not just one good season, is whether the adults in the building treat athletics as part of a student’s education rather than a separate track running alongside it.
That sounds obvious once you say it. It wasn’t obvious to me when I was newer to this work. I was hiring for wins. I should have been hiring for how someone talks to a struggling ninth grader after a loss.
The small thing that changed my approach
The shift for me came from paying closer attention to what happened in the fifteen minutes right after practice or a game ends. Not the drills, not the play calling. The debrief.
Coaches who used that window to connect with kids individually, even briefly, built teams that trusted them. Coaches who used it to lecture the group, or worse, to walk away and let assistants handle it, built teams that complied but didn’t invest. I started asking coaches directly about this in interviews. Not “what’s your system,” but “what do you say to a kid after a bad game.”
The answers told me more about culture-building than any resume line ever did.
Where the standard playbook falls short
A lot of advice in this field treats athletic departments like businesses: set goals, track outcomes, reward performance. That’s not wrong, exactly, but it misses something. Students are not employees. They are still figuring out who they are, and a locker room is one of the places where that happens fastest.
I’ve come to think the job of an athletic director is closer to student development than to management. That means sitting in on practices you don’t need to sit in on. It means knowing which student on the roster is also struggling in the classroom, and making sure the coach knows too. It means treating the Dean of Students side of the work and the athletics side as one job, not two, because for the kids, it already is one experience.
What I do differently now
These days, when I evaluate a program, I look past the win-loss record first. I ask how seniors talk about freshmen. I ask whether kids from a losing team still show up to support other teams at the school. I ask whether a student who gets cut from a roster has somewhere else to land, athletically or otherwise.
None of that shows up on a scoreboard. All of it shows up, eventually, in whether a school’s athletic program actually builds the people inside it, or just uses them for a season and moves on.
The takeaway
If you’re building or evaluating an athletic program, don’t start with the calendar or the coaching resume. Start with what happens in the room when nobody’s watching the game anymore. That’s where the culture actually lives, and it’s the piece I underestimated for longer than I’d like to admit.
