Coaches are the backbone of any sports team. Whether it’s little league sports or the major leagues, a team is nothing without a good coach. It may seem like all coaches do is give motivational locker room speeches or bark orders from the bench during games; however, a coach’s job is certainly not that easy. When a team is performing well and consistently winning, the players receive praise and applause for their hard work, but when a team is losing, the coach will often shoulder a majority of the blame.
Coaches are quickly becoming a target for angry fans and team owners and are often put on the hot seat in the midst of a losing season. It’s understandable to want a coaching change when everything seems to be going wrong, but it seems like major sporting organizations are taking their frustration out on coaches more and more often.
According to New York Daily News columnist Gary Meyers, in the National Football League, 24 of the league’s 32 teams have seen a major coaching change since the end of the 2010 regular season. That translates to approximately 75 percent of the league firing and replacing their coaches within the past six seasons. It’s hard to believe that 75 percent of the league’s coaches were solely responsible for losing records.
There are a large number of factors that contribute to a losing team, and the coach isn’t always one. For example, in the National Hockey League, the Boston Bruins Head Coach Claude Julien is in the hot seat after missing out on last year’s postseason. However, the team’s recent lack of success isn’t solely Julien’s fault; a lot of the blame actually falls to the Bruins’ front office staff, namely former General Manager Peter Chiarelli.
In the final few years of his nine-year career with the team, Chiarelli managed to make a mess of the team’s salary cap through bad contracts and forcing key players to be traded or leave as free agents. Julien now has very limited talent to work with due to Chiarelli’s mistakes, but he is still taking the heat for the team’s losing season. Julien will most likely be one of the next coaches in the NHL to be fired despite his great track record with the team up until the past two seasons.
However, there are a number of situations in which firing a coach is the most fitting. The Brooklyn Nets of the National Basketball Association recently fired Head Coach Lionel Hollins. Hollins led the Nets to their worst season in his one-and-a-half-year career with the team and had a career coaching record of 48-71. However, a losing record isn’t the only element that warranted Hollins’ termination. Many players on the team had little respect for Hollins, and, by the middle of this season, he had completely lost control of the locker room. Firing Hollins was the appropriate course of action to take in this situation because a team can’t be expected to win when they have no real leader.
Firing a coach shouldn’t be the first response to fixing a struggling team. Too often, franchises cut coaches’ careers short due to factors outside of their control. Sometimes, change is necessary, but major league sports organizations are firing their coaches too quickly. It’s time to ease up on the coach shaming and let the teams own up to their faults.
