wgdsr wrote: ↑Fri May 19, 2023 9:46 am
there was a time when virtually no one, outside of hopkins, was fired for producing less than stellar or potential results in college lacrosse. dark ages, maybe, and obviously times and circumstances change. but that legacy is still there to a degree, relating it to say... football and basketball.
the hamster wheel that is the big time sports coaching carousel, to me at least, spits out a lot of chasing maveriks. surely a study can or has been done, to me it looks like there's a lot of chasing your tail. new staffs, new ad's, buyouts, turnover on virtually everything to placate and market the shiny new thing. for every success story, there are likely multiples (5x? 10x?) of look backs that are nothing but spinning wheels.
of course, people can get stale and complacent and be bad fits, tho i'm not sure we're not better off in lacrosse than having a constant carousel going. no, it shouldn't be a lifetime appointment. what are the university goals?
if assistants aren't pulling their weight, they're not immune. but if this ultimately is a scapegoat and lipstick thing, that's pretty sad. they typically do as much or more for a lot less.
I think UMD also had a track record of limited patience?
That said, I'd agree that most turnover (not caused by a coach simply moving to a higher paying program) has been when something went awry and the lacrosse program became a problem for the AD that simply doing reasonably well on the field most years didn't overcome.
I agree that scapegoating assistants is not good...indeed, usually the question is why they were chosen in the first place, how were they managed and mentored, not that it's necessarily their fault that under performance has been chronic...of course, sometimes there really is a poor fit, or the mix of coaches is 'stale', and a change is necessary.
I've seen that up pretty close with my alma mater and then at my son's program (both arguably in long stretches of 'under performance', now hopefully on the upswing) where good assistants for one reason or another left (usually for higher career opportunities in or out of lax but in one case a tragic death) and were replaced by assistants who were disasters...to me that's on the head coach to select and mentor good people. (note,
some of those who choose lax coaching as a career are knuckleheads just like any field...and some of the coaches in lax would perform poorly in a business or professional setting, but were good 'athletes'...these coaches really shouldn't be managing young people in any setting, but they are...).
Seems to me this is really more about economics than anything else. In the non-revenue sports, for most schools the objective is certainly to create a program where excellence is expected and regularly achieved, but that doesn't mean dominance in a league much less nationally is required. Being competitive
is required.
And what interrupts a just "competitive" is when something goes awry that makes the program a headache for the AD. Assistants can be part of a bad tone, but usually that means the head coach is allowing that to be the case.
Doesn't
feel like that's the case for UNC, but perhaps there will be some turnover encouraged...but that should be up to the HC.
