Growing the Teacher-Coach Model
An overlooked path from scarcity to abundance?
Last week, my school’s Athletic Director shared with all of our coaches a piece by Rob Heubeck titled “The Teacher-Coach Advantage: Why Independent Schools Should Prioritize Faculty Who Also Coach Interscholastic Sport.”
Heubeck, it should be noted, works for Finney Search Group, a search firm that specializes in helping independent schools hire dual-threat teacher-coaches. Not coincidentally, he previously served as Head of Upper School at Gilman School, a boys’ school in Baltimore that has long been committed to the teacher-coach model. (Considering that this approach to staffing has been under pressure for a while now, such a pitch also makes good economic sense for his current firm.)
There is much in the piece that is praiseworthy. Heubeck notes the pressures but argues convincingly, for example, that “When a student’s history teacher is also her lacrosse coach, the relationship between them transcends any single domain — that adult knows her as a thinker, a competitor, a teammate, and a young person navigating the pressures of adolescence simultaneously. This dual knowledge is not incidental; it is transformative.”
However, he also conveys—at least to my reading—a set of subtle assumptions that risk undercutting his message somewhat. In one paragraph, he writes:
Oftentimes, academic leaders are enamored of highly credentialed academicians, knowing that the school community demands academic excellence so they can, with pride, detail the school’s college acceptance list. Friction is created between the Athletic Director and the Head of School. The AD, if involved in the hiring process, wants to hire an experienced coach with strong relationship skills who can elevate an athletic program. Classroom inexperience can be developed with the support of mentors and professional development. The Head of School, following the advice of the Upper School Head and the department chair, “needs” to hire an experienced, credentialed teacher. Too often, the department chair’s preferred choice wins out, and the school hires the academician who’s an expert in their field but lacks strong relationship skills and/or is unwilling to contribute to school life beyond the classroom. [emphases mine]
I have a somewhat visceral reaction to this. As someone who wears both hats—history department chair and head baseball coach—and takes each quite seriously, I take issue with the notion that academic leaders only care about academics (and vice versa). That said, I have also seen this dynamic play out, to be sure. Likewise, Heubeck seems to believe that the department chair emerges victorious “too often,” but I have also encountered situations where strong coaches received priority in the hiring process. (If anything, Heubeck’s description of “friction” in the process serves to illustrate some of the many ways in which the model is under stress, and he is ultimately arguing against such a narrow view, in favor of a more holistic approach to hiring—one which I support.)
The more subtle assumption here revolves around Carol Dweck’s concept of fixed vs. growth mindsets. Note that his hypothetical candidates either have “strong relationship skills” or they don’t. Similarly, experienced coaches have the ability to “elevate an athletic program” while “the academician [is] an expert in their field.” The focus in both cases is on what the candidate is (or can do right now), not on what they can learn to do.
On the other hand, Heubeck pivots toward his central argument by noting (correctly) that “classroom inexperience” can be overcome with time and training. Although he doesn’t say this outright, I read him to be subtly suggesting that we should prioritize hiring good coaches, even if they’re weaker in the classroom, because we can develop a teacher over time. But coaching is also a skill—a set of related skills, really—and if we can develop teachers, we can also develop coaches.
In nearly two decades in independent schools, I have certainly encountered “academicians” who knew their disciplines well but struggled to connect with students… but, perhaps to the question of what exactly it means to “elevate an athletic program,” I have encountered far more coaches who, regardless of their relationship skills, prioritized winning over appropriate adolescent development. The most charitable interpretation of this is not that they were callous, transactional coaches (though some surely were), but because they simply knew much more about their sport than they did about the particular needs (social, psychological, physical, etc.) of adolescents.
Practically speaking, schools that remain committed to the teacher-coach model should absolutely strive to hire strong teacher-coaches who bring expertise in multiple realms, but as Heubeck himself notes, “The talent pool is genuinely narrow.” To address this, schools should think not only in terms of hiring; they should also be working actively to “develop their bench.” And this is where a fixed mindset in one realm or the other becomes insidious.
Over the long term, I suspect that schools can probably relieve at least some of the “friction” that Heubeck describes by targeting candidates who may not always have the most impressive resume across the board but who show a willingness and a capacity to learn and grow. Sometimes this might mean hiring a strong coach and “coaching them up” in the classroom; other times, it will mean hiring a strong teacher and showing them the ropes on the field/court/etc.
Professional development should be a non-negotiable, but the development should be tailored to the particular needs of the professional. (And here I’ll posit that this kind of differentiation may be an area where coaches have a genuine edge on teachers who don’t coach, provided that they’re able to successfully apply their skillsets across domains. Because most sports require particular skills at particular positions, and because playing time is limited by rule and lineup size, coaches are accustomed to assigning different drills to different players based on their individual needs, whether positional or developmental. Speaking only for myself, I’m much more comfortable doing this on the baseball field than in the classroom.) Again, though, in schools that remain committed to the teacher-coach model, professional development should explicitly engage both with an eye toward their synergistic potential.
To use another athletic metaphor, we might think of our coaching staffs (and, for that matter, our teaching faculties) in terms of a program-wide depth chart: who is ready to “start” on varsity (hopefully our varsity head coaches!), who can be a “role player” (varsity assistants, JV head coaches, etc.) and who is on the JV squad (probably a mix, but especially lower-level coaches)? There are limits to the metaphor, but the more important questions are:
How do we prepare the role players to assume starting roles when the starters move on? How do we prepare the “JV” squad to move up? How do we determine when they’re ready to do so?