I've been thinking a lot lately about the difference between head coaches and regular coaches, assistant coaches, or whatever the term du jour is. I've been both a head and an assistant coach in different organizations, and there are big differences.
What I've noticed is that the head coach needs to be in charge of setting up and overseeing the program on a higher level, and needs to be able to delegate authority, settle disputes, keep things running smoothly, set duties for other coaches, decide on overall club strategies and long term goals more than just give classes, lessons, strip coach, etc. Not to say that a head coach can't do those things as well, but the other requirements of the job are unique to their position.
The problem I'm seeing, however, is that many head coaches in clubs are simply in that position because they founded the place, and they are also acting as owner and business manager, but having trained or hired on additional coaches, they have not given much thought to the changes in their own job. I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed this, has any thoughts on the subject or any resources and stories or questions to share.
EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention: I do not believe that the head coach needs to be the best or most accomplished coach in the club, but rather needs to have the best managerial skills. If there are assistant coaches who know more (or as much as) the head coach, the head should be able to listen to them and know when to defer to their opinion.
__________________
"If I were ever to challenge you to a duel, your best bet would be battle axes in a very dark basement." Misquoted from The Prisoner
"Technical excellence is the antecedant of tactical creativity." - Nat Goodhartz
But those things which belong neither to God nor to Caeser, feeleth free to writeth them off, for yea, they are deductable.
The problem I'm seeing, however, is that many head coaches in clubs are simply in that position because they founded the place, and they are also acting as owner and business manager, but having trained or hired on additional coaches, they have not given much thought to the changes in their own job. I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed this, has any thoughts on the subject
I'm not in a position to give any advice on this subject, but as a fencer, I have seen this kind of thing at more than one club.
I'll just note that I don't think that this phenomenon is limited to fencing clubs. It's probably a common problem with entrepreneurs. They start a small business that they run by themselves or with a few trusted partners and employees. If the business grows, the business changes and their role in the organization probably needs to change. I suspect that the personality that made them good at starting the business can make it hard for them to recognize or accept that change. I would imagine that clubs in this position could find good resources in more general literature about small businesses and how to transition from an owner-operator business to a larger organization that requires different management skills.
University teams have this sort of heirarchy, but how many private clubs do? It seems that a large majority of clubs whose web pages I visit are either loose associations of coaches (under a "head coach" who is usually the owner) or a single coach and a lot of "assistant coaches" which mostly seem to be senior fencers drafted for assisting with classes.
Not challenging your statements. Just curious what your experiances have been.
I'll send you a PM with some details. I don't want to air anyone's dirty laundry in public.
__________________
"If I were ever to challenge you to a duel, your best bet would be battle axes in a very dark basement." Misquoted from The Prisoner
"Technical excellence is the antecedant of tactical creativity." - Nat Goodhartz
But those things which belong neither to God nor to Caeser, feeleth free to writeth them off, for yea, they are deductable.
University teams have this sort of heirarchy, but how many private clubs do? It seems that a large majority of clubs...
It also seems that a large majority of clubs struggle along in a barely-sustainable state for years. With just a few weeks of inattention from a couple of key individuals, most of those clubs would close.
A more interesting question might be whether the most successful clubs that you've seen have this sort of hierarchy. Pick your own definition for successful, but I'm thinking about clubs that manage sustained growth in numbers and revenue to the point where they have a permanent facility and at least some full-time staff. Even better if they prove that they can survive through a major change in coaching staff. Bonus points if their fencers are actually successful competitively, but I'm thinking more about being successful as a business.
I think that in a lot of clubs, their success is because they are "single proprieter" companies. Clubs like OFA, and NCF work because there is one coach that sets the tone and vision for the club, and there are few other coaches in the mix. These clubs tend to be not much bigger than the "reach" of the head coach (30-40 members, tops). Other clubs may be much bigger in size, but the coaches work independently, and the club is actually held together by a business manager or owner of some sort. And some clubs are simply a loose collection of parts that works as long as there are few stresses on the club, but fracture when the club has to work towards a common goal (such as finding a new space, etc). Often this club will then split into smaller clubs along the single proprieter model, organized around the strongest coaches.
Of course, these are pretty sweeping generalizations, but I might guess that in the private sector, most fencing clubs are going to fit one of these three business models. There might be a handful (less than 10? 15?) clubs in the US that aren't like this, and are strong clubs with cooperative coaches, that aren't university teams. But I'm mostly spit-balling here.
But is this really a surprise? Aren't most small businesses in the US slightly disfunctional? We might ask a different question, which is whether anyone has really tried a strong corporate model for running a fencing club, say, ala Tauber, and whether it's worked or not worked.
As I said, I'm not familiar with the organization of very many clubs, but I'd like to hear of one ran that way.
I never said it was a surprise, Allen. I just said that it's a problem.
I also think that this is the sort of thing which should be included in any formalized coach training. Especially in the US, coaches have to be involved with the day to day running and culture of the club, and they need to learn to have clearly defined duties.
__________________
"If I were ever to challenge you to a duel, your best bet would be battle axes in a very dark basement." Misquoted from The Prisoner
"Technical excellence is the antecedant of tactical creativity." - Nat Goodhartz
But those things which belong neither to God nor to Caeser, feeleth free to writeth them off, for yea, they are deductable.
I never said it was a surprise, Allen. I just said that it's a problem.
I also think that this is the sort of thing which should be included in any formalized coach training. Especially in the US, coaches have to be involved with the day to day running and culture of the club, and they need to learn to have clearly defined duties.
My comment about surprise was mostly rhetorical and for the general readership. I know you're too sharp about this sort of stuff to be surprised.
Good god, yes. One of the things I mentioned in my blog a few weeks ago was how many students walk into a club door and walk right back out again because of unprofessional or poor behavior on the part of the club/coach. I feel very strongly that if clubs and coaches across the US were more professional, we could double the number of fencers in the USFA in ten years without doing any additional advertising or marketing.
It's odd to me. Plenty of people want to talk about marketing fencing, but few want to discuss how to run a professional organization, the differences between leadership (at the young stage of the club) and management (in the more mature stages), employee (coach to coach) relationships, the need for a clearn bathroom in a fencing club and so on.
Some coaches/owners don't do this because they don't know it. Some don't do it because good management will interfere with the reign of terror at their club, and some don't do it because it's a bloody ****load of work, and they opened up a fencing club because they want to teach fencing---not manage coaches, deal with cash flow, clean bathrooms, and all the other things that have to go into running a small business.
However, this is just a list of problems. How can we go about making some solutions? What tools are out there to help a head coach/owner make their job easier? What training should they seek out? What are stories of successful strategies, or just good ideas? I have some ideas/evidence of my own, but I'm going to keep my mouth shut on them for now because I want to see what the community will come up with before I just shift it to a discussion of things I already know.
__________________
"If I were ever to challenge you to a duel, your best bet would be battle axes in a very dark basement." Misquoted from The Prisoner
"Technical excellence is the antecedant of tactical creativity." - Nat Goodhartz
But those things which belong neither to God nor to Caeser, feeleth free to writeth them off, for yea, they are deductable.
However, this is just a list of problems. How can we go about making some solutions? What tools are out there to help a head coach/owner make their job easier? What training should they seek out? What are stories of successful strategies, or just good ideas? I have some ideas/evidence of my own, but I'm going to keep my mouth shut on them for now because I want to see what the community will come up with before I just shift it to a discussion of things I already know.
Training. Clearly training is the answer. But training in a classroom with a lot of talk about "I do this" and "I do that" from experienced owners is sub-optimal. It's hard to actually convey what you do when a student first walks in the door, what you do when a beginner wants more advanced lessons, what you do when Coach Z's star foil kid wants to take Coach M's epee lessons for a while to see if she likes them, or when Coach L doesn't want to teach beginner classes, ever, or if Coach K's standard conversation with you, the owner, starts off with how many of his kids would go with him if he left and started his own club.
Running a club is like fencing, there's a lot of stuff that can't be taught by talking about it. It's interpersonal, it's keeping a professional attitude even when you're mad at someone or they're mad at each other, but it's also good 'technique', which in club ownership or management means good bookkeeping, fair labor practices, that sort of thing.
What fencing really needs? A Chilis. A McDonalds. A Pep Boys. A chain. Chains suck. But they train managers, they have policies in place, they have structures and plans for keeping books, for labor practices, for decor, for price structures, for dealing with suppliers. I worked at a non-chain pizza place in college. The people who came up through the ranks of the place I worked were wildly variable as managers. The remind me a lot of self-trained fencing club managers. The people who were really good managers had always been trained at the Pizza Hut down the street. They were no better as people, but they made lists and set policies and were organized and posted notices two weeks in advance and made shift changes in a rational way; they'd been through a week of training on not pissing off your employees, then they'd been assistant managers for six months and sat in on meetings to resolve labor disputes and handle unhappy customers. That's what fencing needs, a chain, McParrie's. Someone who has run a McParries for a year could start his own club easily, and know how to run it.
And a McParrie's could make a lot of money. A pre-fab franchise with top down marketing support, a built in price structure, an understood pay scale, you could do ok with something like that.
But then there's always places like NWFC, which has plenty of professional coaches who aren't Michael Marx.
I feel like it's rather risky to bring up some other places, many of which just have one assistant coach, and I don't want to involve personalities. On the other hand, probably the most successful club financially in my region has a non-fencing owner who works entirely off employees to handle the non-administrative side.
I think the entrepreneurial challenge was well described. I've thought several times I'd like to run a fencing club, but I hate coaching (or any form of structured teaching). So if I were to found a club, I'd have to pay the costs of a professional coach to run the club, while I somehow skimmed enough off the top to support myself. I'm secure where I am and don't want to work for a cash strapped startup that may not be able to make payroll. It seems unless you have a lot of capital it would be very hard to afford someone to just coach, and someone to just manage.
The point at which you can afford more than one full time employee for the club is, in my experience, about 70-100 fencers. Of course, depending on cost structure, other sources of income, cost of living, etc, this may change from club to club.
__________________
"If I were ever to challenge you to a duel, your best bet would be battle axes in a very dark basement." Misquoted from The Prisoner
"Technical excellence is the antecedant of tactical creativity." - Nat Goodhartz
But those things which belong neither to God nor to Caeser, feeleth free to writeth them off, for yea, they are deductable.
Talk to the NJ club that just opened up its third location...
Mr. Ma's multiple locations, as far as I can see, don't act like a true franchise, since they don't seem to share a unity of teaching method, curriculum, and so forth. I'm not even sure if they share the same pricing model (though I'm much less sure about this).
Mr. Ma's multiple locations, as far as I can see, don't act like a true franchise, since they don't seem to share a unity of teaching method, curriculum, and so forth. I'm not even sure if they share the same pricing model (though I'm much less sure about this).
There's a place here in Houston that has several locations. I was more talking about a franchise on the level of fifty clubs in twenty states, where you actually buy a franchise right such as one might do with McDonalds, you own the business but you get a business plan and a name and graphics and a price structure and central training and all that. If you get to that point you'll start to have real side effects of McParries' economies of scale in the larger fencing world, there would be lots of benefits.
They would also drive some existing small clubs out of business, maybe. Or maybe not. I have a friend who owns a club to whom I have often said, "Your competition is not the fencing club fifty or sixty miles away in the next city. It's the karate studio down the street."
Regarding the franchise thing, the wikipedia article says:
"Businesses for which franchising is said to work best have the following characteristics:
* Businesses with a good track record of profitability.
* Businesses built around a unique or unusual concept.
* Businesses with broad geographic appeal.
* Businesses which are relatively easy to operate.
* Businesses which are relatively inexpensive to operate.
* Businesses which are easily duplicated[13].
[13] Alon, Ilan (2005), Service Franchising: A Global Perspective, New York: Springer."
I'm not sure a fencing club is easy to operate. On the other hand, it is an unusual concept, does have broad geographic appeal. I don't know. I still rather think it could work.
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