College sports are changing right before our very eyes, including dramatic shifts with NIL money, the transfer portal, and even the sudden acceptance of legalized gambling. One change, however, that is not being talked about relates to the ways in which college coaches are increasingly becoming more callous and businesslike with how they interact with student athletes. Granted, college coaches were always more serious than youth and interscholastic coaches, generally speaking, but today’s college coaches are changing with the times as well. Previous efforts to offer holistic mentoring to complement sport coaching is becoming a thing of the past, as more college coaches today are viewing their job as just that — a job.
Coaching as a job
As college sports increasingly more resemble professional sports (can we even tell a difference anymore?), it should come as no surprise that fewer and fewer college coaches today are embracing their previous broad role of being coach, mentor, and teacher (and maybe even mental health specialist). Instead, and more like their professional coach counterparts, the new college coach approach is to stay exclusively within the lines of what gets coaches paid — building strong programs and winning games. Being a friend and mentor to student athletes is no longer a factor when it comes to coach contracts, and there are fewer and fewer bonuses to even incentivize coaches to play those roles. So why take time away from recruiting, drumming up NIL money, or watching film, to instead sit down with a student athlete and talk about her courses, or what she wants to do after sports? While those kinds of relationships existed before, the full professional sport business model now being employed does not require or ask of that anymore, as really the only thing that matters is winning — and making money.
I work with college student athletes every day, and I am regularly told how cold and business-like college coaches are these days. Don’t like it here? Transfer out. Got a problem with my coaching style? Tough. Need help with issues off the field? Check with athletics to see who can help. To be clear, college coaches are not bad people! What has happened, however, is that their jobs (and related salaries) have now been narrowed down to simply generating revenue — especially for coaches of non-revenue sports (i.e. wrestling, volleyball, etc) that could be on the cutting block.
Translation: There isn’t much time left over to build relationships, lend support to personal problems, and mentor.
But before you pile on coaches for getting away from the human side of the job, ask yourself how much effort you would put into getting to know student athletes as people when you are no longer expected to, or acknowledged for it? This is just one more unforeseen, and unwanted, new change to college sports.
One takeaway is to better prepare upcoming college student athletes about the realities of the business approach to college sports in modern times. The days of comforting and coddling student athletes appears to be replaced by a more direct approach of only the strong survive (and those who don’t transfer out). The previous growth and educational piece relating to college sports has been replaced almost entirely, with a new hyper-focus on winning with revenue-producing programs (i.e. football), and cutting the fat from programs that do not make the school money.
Final thoughts
A lot has changed in college sports these last few years, including the ways in which college student athletes are being treated today. Like pro sports, the value of the player is what he can do right now on the field or court, not how many A’s he can earn in the classroom. Play hard, and whatever problems you might experience are up to you to sort out. As college sports become professional sports, expect to see more programs cut, and student athletes to be treated more as employees than students.
drstankovich.com
