You would want to split it so one person doesn’t have to manage as many athletes. Lots of top teams do this. And a lot of the teams that don’t do this on their website still do this, the head coach coaches one gender and the assistant does the other one.
It’s the exception, not the norm.
The better recipe is one strong head coach, and an assistant. You let the head focus on coaching and recruiting. Maximize their talents and interests. The assistant supports recruiting, and does the admin and operations tasks that wear down on a good head coach. Let them do whatever the head coach doesn’t want to do, or what is their weakness.
Split programs are a recipe for conflict. If one gender is doing better than the other, athletes start wanting the other genders coach. There will be a lot of, why do the men (or women) get that and we don’t. If the school expects the genders to travel together, who gets to decide what meets they go to, where they stay, where they eat, what the itinerary is. If they are going to different meets, athletes start saying, I wish we went where the other gender went or why did they go there and we didn’t.
It sounds like a plan cooked up by an admin who has never been around college track/xc.
Maybe ASU can convince one strong coach to come, but trying to get two is also a challenge. Pay the dollars to get an experienced coach. And then a newcomer assistant. Splitting the dollars of a mistake.
Distance coaches are a dime a dozen and you think its hard to find two coaches to get paid to do what they love? :))))))))))))
Staying with jobs: Lead candidates for the U of South Carolina job ??
I have heard anything yet and I've got a pretty reliable source. The school should allow whoever comes in to have full control to change things. Outside of throws and internationals they've declined as a team theses past few years.
Men and women need different training, different culture work, and often different personalities of coaches. As a coach of 50+ athletes my men and women have completely different training plans, team meetings, and I I literally have to be a different coach for each group, because thats what they need to succeed. it seems to be working -but takes double of everything if you want to do it right. I am guessing they want to find the right fit for each group- But i can also see if creating a split in vision for the program overall of you weren’t careful.
I could see how that would be tough to manage in some situations, however it's not unheard of for coaches to be able to coach both successfully while also being aware of these nuances.
Definitely possible, I think the issue a lot of the time is only once coach understands those nuances and that's where the tension is. Hopefully it works out and even if there are issues I highly doubt it will be anything derailing or catastrophic.