Sarasota County coaches dish on their profession's high turnover rate

There's a natural air of change to high school sports. 

Players leave after four years or decide to focus on one sport over another. Coaches, and parents, deal with this change all the time. What used to be more constant, though, was the coaches themselves. It's no longer a given that players will end up playing for the same coach they started with, and the percentage is likely higher than most people realize. 

32 head coaching positions across Sarasota, Riverview, Cardinal Mooney and Booker high schools have opened from January 2016 to now. 

There’s two scenarios at play when coaches leave a job, according to Chad Sutton, the volleyball coach at Sarasota High before taking the Cardinal Mooney job in 2016. The first: as Sutton did, a coach leaves for a different school. When it occurs within the same county, it’s often because of “fit,” Sutton said. In his case, Sutton said he feels more comfortable in a smaller environment, where everybody knows everybody, and where the vision he has for the program is supported by the administration. Not every school would be OK with adding beach volleyball courts to campus, as Sutton has wanted to do since his hiring.

The other, Sutton said, is coaches leaving the profession for good. While there’s no one answer for why coaches leave, Sutton has an idea of why some might.

“Coaches are getting less of a leash to work with kids before parents become unhappy,” Sutton said. “It’s a grind. I can tell you, from when I was a high school player to now, there’s been a culture shift. It’s ‘me-first’ now. Finding team players gets harder and harder.”

Sutton said he’s not experiencing that kind of thing at Cardinal Mooney, but has heard from friends in the profession who have run camps for 9-14 year olds this summer, and have had parents complain about their kids’ placement in the camps. Sutton believes good coaches would stick around longer if they had more trust.

Booker High athletic director Phil Helmuth coached the Tornadoes’ boys basketball team before taking the AD position, and still helps with the program when he can without overstepping his bounds. Helmuth said influence from outside forces comes not just about playing time, but winning. Coaching has become a full-time position, he said, with workouts being conducted through the offseason. If a coach doesn’t want to devote that much time, the coach isn’t likely to find much success, and then the pressure builds. If it gets too high, parents and alumni are going to want a change. This makes hiring the right coach, who is equipped to handle all that comes with the position, a difficult task, Helmuth said. New teachers often aren’t ready to coach, even if they’re qualified, because they’re still learning to handle their work schedule.

“When we were hiring for our girls basketball position two years ago,” Helmuth said, “I had one candidate tell me that 60% of (girls basketball) coaching positions that year were new hires. That certainly raised some red flags.”

Continuity is important, Helmuth said. You try to hire people who want to build something. Elementary and middle school kids attend games across the community, and if they see a coach or program with annual success, they’re more likely to want to play there. That matters in an age where kids can attend whichever school they want. Finding coaches who are in it for the long term is difficult, Helmuth said.  You have to hear a coaches’ vision, make sure it matches with yours, and then feel out their passion for the school, community and sport.

Helmuth eventually hired Loy Moore as Booker’s girls basketball coach. Moore left after one season. The job now belongs to Riverview High grad Shantia Grace.

Moore left out of family considerations, a thought that has also crossed the mind of Riverview football coach Josh Smithers. Smithers joined the Rams as an assistant coach in 2016 after stepping down as the head man at Cardinal Mooney, then took the Rams head job when Todd Johnson left the program to pursue business opportunities. One of the reasons Smithers left the Cougars, he said, was to step back from some of the responsibilities. The job was taking too much time away from his wife, Natalie Smithers, and their three kids, Madison, Hope and Trey. When Johnson left, Smithers decided he was ready to step into the role again, but he also thinks about what might happen down the line.

“My biggest struggle is being with my own kids,” Smithers said. “If the job ever got in the way of me missing their games, then that would be a big issue.”

Right now, it isn’t one. Smithers said his staff at Riverview is made of on-campus employees (something that wasn’t always the case at Cardinal Mooney), so if he needs to miss a day of weight training for a family event, it’s not a huge deal. His family is supportive, he said. 

Smithers, Helmuth and Sutton all said some of these issues could be worth the trouble if coaches were paid a salary reflective of the work they put into their profession. Sarasota County is a mid-tier county in terms of Florida coaching supplements, but the state as a whole lags behind states such as Texas and Georgia in paying coaches.

“I think coaches want to be paid more and held to a higher standard, because that’s reciprocated,” Sutton said. “I’m a professional, so allow me to be a professional. I’m not just a babysitter. I’m spending all my off-hours with your kids. Coaches make sacrifices.

“When you pay people more, you get respect. It would help prevent coaches from leaving and also set the standard for everybody that’s involved in the equation. That means saying, ‘Hey, we’re paying someone to do this job, so we’re not going to take calls about playing time,’ etc. My school does an awesome job of shielding that stuff, but I’ve heard it from other places, other coaches.”

Riverview volleyball coach Nickie Halbert, hired in 2017, said she’s had conversations with her dad, Gary Halbert, who coached multiple sports at Sarasota over 27 years, about this topic. Nickie Halbert said her dad doesn’t think he’d want to coach today,  though she is happy in her position. Helmuth said he misses some aspects of coaching, the hands-on ones, but not others.

“It can be very rewarding,” he said. “But also very draining. There’s so many variables in play.”

It’s those variables that make the profession topsy-turvy. With more pressure to win and more time to commit than ever before, coaching transitions at the high school level seem destined to increase.