Why Good Coaches Leave

The Premise

Recently a coach told me they wouldn’t be returning to their club next season. They weren’t leaving because of the facilities. They weren’t leaving because of the athletes. They weren’t even leaving because of compensation. They were leaving because they no longer felt supported.

What struck me wasn’t that this coach was leaving. It was that they were the latest in a series of good coaches the club had lost over the past few years.

When club leaders lose coaches, the first question is usually about pay. Should we increase stipends? Should we offer more travel reimbursement? Should we provide additional incentives? Sometimes compensation is the issue. But often it isn’t.

Research from Gallup found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement across teams. Who people work for matters more than most organizations realize, and Simon Sinek’s work points to why. In Leaders Eat Last, he argues that people don’t leave jobs. They leave environments where they don’t feel safe. He calls a leader’s primary responsibility creating a “Circle of Safety”: an environment where people are protected from external threats so they can focus their energy on the work that matters. Coaches may not describe it as “engagement,” but they know exactly what it feels like to be supported or exposed.

That’s the kind of lens The LnUP Letters tries to bring, taking what leadership research has already figured out and asking what it means for the people running club programs.

Most club directors aren’t trying to expose their coaches. But the culture many create, often optimized around filling team rosters, managing parent expectations, and growing the club, can unintentionally come at the expense of coach security. The result is coaching turnover they attribute to compensation when the actual driver may be that coaches feel constantly exposed.

The Circle of Safety, Translated

The external threats in a club are real and relentless: demanding parents, tournament results, athlete attrition, recruiting competition from rival clubs, and increasingly, social media commentary. The director’s job is to absorb those pressures so coaches can coach. When directors deflect parent pressure onto coaches instead of absorbing it, they’ve inverted the Circle. Coaches spend energy surviving internally instead of developing athletes.

Most directors don’t realize what they’re signaling in these moments. Consider a parent who emails the director after a disappointing tournament complaining about playing time decisions. One response forwards the email to the coach and says “can you handle this?” The other responds directly to the parent, acknowledges the concern, reinforces the club’s philosophy, and tells the parent the matter will be reviewed. The coach is informed and included, but not left to stand alone. Same situation. Completely different signal.

The director’s response doesn’t need to be dismissive or defensive. It should acknowledge the parent’s concern, affirm that playing time decisions are made in accordance with the club’s developmental philosophy, and indicate that the director will follow up if warranted. What it should never do is signal that the coach is standing alone or that every coaching decision is immediately open for negotiation. The message, even if delivered between the lines, is: we stand behind our staff and our process.

Three Behaviors That Signal Safety (or the Absence of It)

1. Public backing, private coaching. Directors who support coach decisions publicly and address concerns privately build trust. Directors who second-guess coaches in front of parents or athletes, even with good intentions, erode it. The rule is simple: disagree behind closed doors and present a unified front outside them. A useful gut check after any parent escalation is whether your coach left the interaction feeling supported or scrutinized.

2. Set the rules before the conflict. Coaches who know exactly how their director will handle a parent escalation before it happens feel safe. Coaches who don’t are always bracing. A preseason conversation that outlines how parent complaints will be handled, what issues the director will absorb, what responsibilities coaches will own, and when communication will occur creates clarity before emotions enter the equation. In many ways, that conversation becomes a Circle of Safety contract.

3. The director eats last. Sinek’s phrase describes leaders who absorb inconvenience so their team doesn’t have to. In club terms: when the board is unhappy, the director carries that pressure first. When a parent demands a meeting, the director shows up. When criticism arrives, the director helps filter it into productive coaching conversations rather than simply passing it downstream. The coaches who stay long-term are often not the ones facing fewer challenges. They’re the ones who don’t feel like they’re fighting two wars at once, one against external results and another against internal politics.

What This Doesn’t Mean

None of this suggests coaches should be shielded from accountability. Sinek is explicit that the Circle of Safety isn’t about protecting poor performance. It’s about separating two distinct questions: is this coach doing their job well, and is this coach supported in front of the organization. The first belongs in a private leadership conversation. The second should almost always be yes while the relationship exists.

Directors who master this distinction gain a real leadership tool. They can hold coaches to high standards privately while presenting a unified front publicly. That combination, rigorous internally and protective externally, is what builds the kind of trust that keeps great coaches from looking elsewhere. Directors who conflate the two, allowing public accountability to replace private coaching conversations, often end up with coaches who feel both scapegoated and underappreciated. That’s the worst of both outcomes.

A future issue will explore the other side of this equation: why athletes and families leave, and what that means for how organizations develop, evaluate, and support coaches. It’s the same framework applied in the opposite direction.

One Thing to Do This Week

Think about the last time a coach on your staff was criticized externally, by a parent, an athlete, a board member, or publicly online. What did you do in the 48 hours that followed? Did your response signal that the coach was inside the Circle or outside it?

The answer may tell you more about coach retention than your pay scale does.

Coaches rarely leave because of a single difficult parent, a bad tournament, or a tough season. They leave when they realize they’re standing alone. The coaches who leave aren’t always chasing something better. Sometimes they’re simply exhausted from not feeling safe where they are.

That’s the question The LnUP Letters asks every issue, just with a different framework and a different problem worth solving.