The Curious Case of College Coaching: A Story of
Unconventional Forethought
August 8,
2009
The
coaching profession is an industry in which ones ability
to attain greatness is not completely predicated on ones
ability to attain maximum gain on its desired capital,
which in coaching is better known as the winning of
games. Although wins are a fine barometer of success for
a coach, as financial profit is to a broker or the
curing of patients is to a doctor, a coach’s career is
defined by much more than the actual on court success
they may achieve. The inherent dissimilarity that
coaching has from the majority of other professions is
that most who enter it never truly have the opportunity
to perform on its highest stage, which on the college
level is becoming the head coach of a Division I
program.
To become a college head coach, there is no definitive
path for an assistant. One is just as likely to inherent
the position from their former boss (known as sequential
hiring) as they are to obtain one the old fashioned way,
by interviewing for it. Yet what is amazing is that
there are hundreds of assistant coaches who either by
faith, or more likely bad luck, have been apart of
winning programs their whole careers and yet have never
been afforded the opportunity to take over their own.
Frankly, the process of becoming a head coach is, for lack
of better words, a straight up crapshoot. It is
therefore not unreasonable to say that the business of
coaching on the college level is ostensibly unfair and
that any reasonably intelligent person would do well to
stay away from the field. Yet year after year some of
the dozens of ambitious young minds enter the business
only to find themselves on the outside looking in a few
years later, or worse yet, spend their entire careers
toiling in the mediocrity of being someone else’s
assistant.
Up until a few years ago this was the harsh reality that
aspiring young basketball coaches faced, an unduly
burdensome uphill climb of an ever-steeper mountain.
Inevitably, human nature being the way it is, this
archaic practice was to be revolutionized by something
so brilliant in its simplicity one can only wonder why
it took so long to think of in the first place. The
Villa 7 Consortium, run by Virginia Commonwealth
University (VCU), has transformed and modernized the
business of coaching… and turned it upside its head for
good measure.
Villa 7 was by VCU’s own admission originated as a
self-serving idea. Locate, weed out and then cultivate
the best and brightest that the basketball coaching
profession has to offer to insure that their program
would always have its pick of the finest young coaches
available to run it. Bring in head coaches with
different levels of experience, from just hires, to
first years, to veterans and have them spread their
knowledge to the next generation of great talent. Then
for good measure, put all these coaches into a room with
dozens upon dozens of athletic directors and open up the
same opportunity to every college program. Speed dating,
coaches’ style.
How does one ace the interview? Survive his first 100 days
on the job? His first loss… or better yet his first
losing season? How does one manage to fund raise, attend
a dozen speaking engagements, recruit countless future
players and still have time to actually do what he was
hired to do, win games? The coaches, athletic directors
and media experts in attendance answer all these
questions and more. A smorgasbord of everything
coaching, by coaches, for coaches.
In just 4 years of existence, 38 assistants who have
participated in Villa 7 have gone on to become head
coaches. To put that number in perspective, of
assistants who took over programs in the last 4 years
approximately 50% of them are Villa 7 participants. This
may not seem that impressive until one considers that
fewer than 75 coaches have participated in Villa 7,
compared to an outside pool of candidates which numbers
well over 1200. Those who are fortunate enough to be
invited to Villa 7, by statistics alone, are almost
guaranteed to become a head coach within a few years of
their participation.
Not surprisingly, athletic directors (whose own jobs are
often predicated on the success of the coaches they
hire) have thoroughly embraced Villa 7. For those
directors, the consortium significantly reduces the risk
associated with hiring an assistant coach because the
pool of candidates they are selecting from has already
been refined and polished. What is more noteworthy and
what the average fan must realize is that Villa 7 is
more than just a phenomenal opportunity for assistant
coaches; it is a blessing in disguise for the game of
college basketball itself. By weeding out the good from
the bad and then making it even better, VCU has taken a
major step towards insuring that the finest available
assistant coaches will run college basketball programs
and consequentially a better brand of basketball will
now be accessible for fan consumption.
Whether from the perspective of a coach, athletic
administrator or the fan themselves, the Villa 7
Consortium might be the greatest thing to happen to
college basketball since the implementation of the
3-point line over two decades ago. It may not have such
a nearly clear and obvious effect, but that is because
its consequences can only be seen when one looks at the
very core of how college programs are run. Above all
else, VCU has done something that those involved in the
college basketball coaching profession should be
eternally grateful for… insured that hard work,
dedication, and success will now translate into the
ultimate of opportunities.
The
coaching profession is an industry in which ones ability
to attain greatness is not completely predicated on ones
ability to attain maximum gain on its desired capital,
which in coaching is better known as the winning of
games. Although wins are a fine barometer of success for
a coach, as financial profit is to a broker or the
curing of patients is to a doctor, a coach’s career is
defined by much more than the actual on court success
they may achieve. The inherent dissimilarity that
coaching has from the majority of other professions is
that most who enter it never truly have the opportunity
to perform on its highest stage, which on the college
level is becoming the head coach of a Division I
program. 
