High School Coaches, what is your other job?

Teacher.

I dont coach high school anymore, but when I did, I also worked as a casino dealer.

You have to be able to have a flexible schedule. A friend of mine pulled it off after years of working as a pharmacist, then a head pharmacist of a veterans home, and then an adminstrator at a big hospice service. Keep in mind for a good program in high school you need to be able to be at every practice, usually by 3:00pm and not get home until 6 or 7 and every Saturday during the season is booked up.

Got to have a job that can work with you. Forget sales if you need to travel every day. It works for very few other than teachers or retired people. The one that worked for me was a factory midnight shift.

Or you can start your own business and make your own hours.

forgot to mention, besides a teacher. ive already ruled that one out.

You do realize that coaching is essentially teaching, right?

Teacher

everyone i know who teaches coaches too. a school xc/track schedule obviously aligns with the school schedule. i'm a baker. i found this early morning shift to allow me to deal with the diverse schedule such as leaving early for competitions or returning late. the crappy part is that when we go away to something like states the other coaches who are teachers get paid for being there as if they were in school teaching. i have to call in a day off.

I work as a manager at a normal 8-5 job. Due to my schedule, I have to have morning practice before school and later practices after work. Kids are fine with it because they have improved significantly. However, meet days require juggling my schedule and make it hard.

The biggest problem I see NOT being a teacher at the school is recruiting. The kids need constant recruiting and constant discussion to really be a good team. Our team is small in comparison to everyone around us and I believe it is due to the lack of contact with kids during school hours.

The only reason I get the kids I have is because of our reputation to be very good. One of the top teams in the state each year. But my numbers are very small.

I recommend being a teacher if you really want to succeed as a HS coach.

I concur. Anybody who wants to coach HS and does not want to be a teacher is not going to have much success with getting the better kids to come out.

I found a girl who was smarter than I am(other than marrying me) and I stay home with the kids and coach as well.I might also add that anyone thinking about coaching and doing it right better have a spouse who is supportive. Lots of weekends gone. Saturday meets most the fall and we do long runs Sunday AM most of the season. Plus camp, footlocker, yada, yada, yada. Lots of time away from home.

I'm a former teacher turned graduate student. We've coached the team "by committee" for about 10 years now. That is to say, we have 3 knowledgeable coaches each of whom is at practice 3-4 days a week.

I've been able to keep up this schedule as a full time PhD student (after stopping teaching). However, I don't know if I could pull it off at another school. It works for the following reasons:

1. I have a presence/reputation in the school from when I taught. That, however, is fading as the years pass.

2. I have the trust of the athletic director and others (parents, administration, athletes) to run the team, which I established when teaching. It would probably be a harder sell to get a head coaching position otherwise (being there, say, 3-4 days a week and not 5-6 as is usual).

3. Our team is pretty decent. Top 5 in the state on the guys side, some team wins in county champs etc.

I think what another poster said about recruiting and numbers *might* be true. I can't say for sure. My team is actually a little bigger now than it was when I was teaching. But overall, we're small and always have been, probably always will be.

I do make an effort to get into the middle schools and I also talk to every other coach who cuts athletes and gets them sent our way. We have tough demographics though. Small numbers play sports, so almost no one gets cut from the team sports. Furthermore, large in-poverty population, often African American or Hispanic, who haven't historically run XC. (Our track team, however, benefits!) We do what we can.

It works for us. The girls team has always been a little weaker (due, in part, to the other team sports being so readily available: in the fall, girls can play soccer, field hockey, or volleyball -- without even being very good. Boys have soccer and football only, and football and XC don't overlap much.) But our boys team is good. We have for the six years I've been here usually had the best distance runner in the county, which we stock up to individualized good coaching. We've had some team wins, and good team finishes, but we'll never compete with the teams with 120 runners.

I am a civil engineer and manage a division of the city public works department. My regular work hours are 7:00-3:30 but they are flexible enough to get me to practice by 3:45. I am "the boss" so don't really have a supervisor to whom I report. I admit that it's a good gig. Most government situations like mine don't require overtime or weekend work and the leave is usually quite flexible.

Heisencoach wrote:

I'm a chemistry teacher and cook crystal. I recruit kids for the team in class. Once they're fast and I know I can trust them, they become one of my "runners". We' ve won states twice in the last nine years, some of the kids have paid their way through college, and I net a quarter mil per year.

That's wassup.

Property & Casualty Insurance Agent

Selling shoes at the oldest running store in America until 3, coaching until 5:30, graduate school until 9. Livin the dream 24/7... L-I-V-I-N

Agree. I was the non-faculty track/XC coach for three years at my daughter's school. (I was self-employed and had a flexible schedule and was at practice by 2:30 most days).

It's hard enough when you are a teacher on campus to get good athletes out for track/XC, so not being at school every day interacting with kids made it exponentially harder.

I was the only coach - no assistants - and the football AND boys and girls basketball coaches discouraged their players from coming out for the track team, which meant I had very little depth and talent, especially on the boys side. When you're a non-faculty coach of a sport that gets little respect at the school already and the football coach - usually the most powerful and respected coach on campus - is stabbing you in the back, it makes building a program difficult to say the least. Not surprisingly, my girls team was stronger.

I relied on the kids to recruit their friends and I would hang around campus during school hours whenever I could, like having lunch in the lunchroom and going to many of the football, basketball, volleyball games, etc. I also visited all the junior high P.E. classes that would allow me to come and recruit, trying to get younger kids involved early.

With a lot of hard work, our girls track team went from 26th to 12th to 6th at state in those three years and had several All-State athletes in both track and XC. Also had a couple of kids get some scholarship offers. The highest boys finish was 12th at state.

Bottom line: It can be done, but it is a tough job. It was one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, but I personally wouldn't consider coaching track again unless I was a teacher at the school where I coached.

I am in radio broadcasting. Hours are 5-2. Practice starts at 2:30. Home by 5:30 or 6 unless its a meet day.

I own a hot dog concession cart with vendor's license for a prime location downtown.

Oldest running store in America? Where is that?