Making the Move: Are You Ready to Be a Head Coach?

By: Zach Weinberg, Assistant Coach - Tennessee Tech Univ.

Originally Published in: Coaching Volleyball

There are many different stages in a volleyball coach's career, and for many coaches, becoming a successful head coach is the final stage. As an assistant coach, it is important to be learning your craft, developing your coaching philosophy and constantly networking. However, when you feel that you are ready to jump to the next stage of your career and become a head coach, how do you truly know if you've prepared yourself? This is a question that many assistants ask themselves all the time, and for many people, it holds them back in applying for that next stage of their career.

To find out how an assistant coach can best prepare themselves to become a successful head coach, I asked two members of our athletics department here at Tennessee Tech who were once coaches and have now segued into successful careers in administration for their best advice. Associate Athletic Director for Sports/Compliance Frank Harrell spent 14 years as an assistant, 10 years as a head coach, and has now been in athletics administration for over 20 years. Director of Compliance Mandy Thatcher began her career as an assistant volleyball coach before moving over into the administrative side. Both Harrell and Thatcher have been on hiring committees that hired an assistant coach for their first head coaching roles, and they shared with me what some of those assistants did to best prepare themselves for the big jump into the boss chair.

FH: The best assistants, regardless of level,
recruit well. I'm not just talking about recruiting student-athletes and being able to sell the volleyball part to the athlete; to make the move up, good assistants need to be able to sell the volleyball program, school, the city...everything. When interviewing to become a head coach, a good assistant needs to make the interview committee believe that they will be able to always sell the best of what the school has to offer.

MT: Make sure that as an assistant coach, you are developing and constantly maintain a coaching plan. In this plan, you should document everything of note that happens in your program - the good and the bad - and write down what you would have done if the situation required you to decide the course of action. Would it have been different than your head coach handled it? What can be learned from the situation? Also, having a number of administrative duties in your current job description are attractive to a hiring committee. Head coaches have a ton of administrative duties they are responsible for, and even if they hand those duties off to assistants, they are ultimately responsible for their completion. Having a track record as an assistant of handling these duties shows a committee that you are ready to take on more of them in a larger role as the head coach.

FH: Also, always make sure that as an assistant, your network is incredibly large. Not only do you want to network with current head coaches, but make sure you are networking with other assistant coaches that will be making the jump to head coach soon. Those are the contacts that will be making calls on your behalf, and it is always a good thing to have peers in your sport that can speak to your abilities. Finally, and it sounds trivial, but when applying for a head coaching job, make sure that you closely follow the application directions. I've been on many committees where the candidate we liked simply didn't submit a part of the application that was required by the school. If you can't be organized enough to simply apply for the position, why would the hiring committee think you'd be organized enough to be the next head coach?

Good luck!