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AFM Magazine


Letter from the Publisher

Is the New Breed of Coaches Generation M?
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I recently had the opportunity to spend the day with coaching icon Don Nehlen. The 64-year old West Virginia legend certainly lives up to his advance billing as one of the real gentlemen and "class acts" in all of football. As I listened to coach Nehlen's stories of his life in the profession, I began to wonder how many young men entering the coaching ranks in 2000 are doing so for the right reasons.

The staggering high six- and sometimes seven-figure salaries that the modern coaches are being rewarded with are a recent phenomenon. Coaches like Woody Hayes, Bear Bryant, Joe Paterno, Bobby Bowden, and Don Nehlen did not enter the profession for the money. Sure they made and do make nice salaries, and some even wealthy. But this has been more a result of well-heeled alumni getting these coaches into lucrative business deals, as opposed to huge salaries. These coaches and countless others at junior high and high school programs across the nation entered the coaching world because they wanted to "make a difference." They wanted to touch and affect the lives of the hundreds of young men they coached. Money was never their concern.

Yet, I cannot help but question if potential big paydays are what is leading many a current young coach to choose the profession. If the answer to this is yes, I fear for the future.

"Once your
motivation for
success changes,
so will your
results."

No one knows better than each of you reading this letter the precarious nature of coaching. The pressures and potential pitfalls are numerous. As my friend Dr. Thom Park recently wrote in an article discussing coaches' contracts, "Sports sociologists have called contemporary football coaches 'the high-priests of modern secular society.' Lionized by their faithful, revered by alumni in success, and battered by the media in failure, coaches must be surrogate parents, educators, father confessors, community icons, fund-raisers, university PR men, strategists, celebrities, politicians, role-models, recruiters, managers, businessmen and organizational leaders..."

Every word Dr. Park wrote is 100% true, and unless a young man is ready, willing and able to accept those awesome responsibilities with the very real appreciation that he may never make a lot of money, he should choose a different way to make a living. The odds of signing a five-year $3 million deal are just too great to allow that to be the motivation for choosing the profession.

I once heard a saying that simply states: "Once your motivation for success changes, so will your results." The older coaches and those no longer with us knew this; they chose coaching for all of the right reasons. I can only hope that the newest members of the coaching fraternity do not end up being known as Generation M... for money.

Sincerely yours,

Barry Terranova
Publisher






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