Tuesday, November 12th - 4 hours

Today's big conversation among the directors was one of the coaches deciding to leave mid-season, what to do with coaches that aren't a good fit, and how to approach other challenges going forward within the club.

As inconvenient as it is, coaches are at-will employees and are not held to a contract to finish both fall and spring season. People leave for a variety of reasons, in this case it was someone who got a new job whose new schedule would not allow them to coach. The ideal option would be to hire a coach before January, but this is a rare occurrence. The next option is to ask one of the other current coaches to take on an additional team. Some are willing to do this, but the directors also know that many of the coaches already dedicate a lot of time to the club on top of their full-time jobs and some of them their own families. The last option is for one of the directors to take on yet another team. Each of them currently has two to three teams which keeps them busy and often creates game scheduling conflicts, especially during tournaments. Unfortunately for the directors, this is usually what happens, but they accept is as part of their role.

An even bigger challenge than a coach voluntarily leaving is a coach not being a good fit for a team. This happens every year of course, but it's even worse when a team goes backwards compared to making progress. They could only think of a handful of times when they had to ask a coach to leave mid season, but almost every year during end of the season evaluations they discuss expectations to improve and steps to get there for a few coaches. They also make a point to attend these trainings to see where there are growth opportunities and games in order to make suggestions for the following training sessions. Often times a coach just needs an additional point of view.