Grandstand View: Who Pays the Coach?

Seeking a sustainable model to develop athletes.

Parker Morse Tuesday, January 22, 2013, 12:00 am

While we're still glowing following the twin silver medals of Leo Manzano and Galen Rupp in London, let's take a minute to think about who's going to produce our next Olympic medals. Not the athletes: the coaches.

Self-motivated, part-time athletes with families and careers tend to think of coaches as people who design training programs, but in the arc of a professional athlete's career, a good coach-athlete relationship can be as important as a marriage.

Coaches spot talent, motivate athletes, hold them back, push them forward, plan seasons with them, strategize races with them. Athletes need different things from coaches at different times in their careers. There is no "best coach" who is all things to all runners at all times.

The American system of athlete development grew up with intercollegiate athletics. In the amateur era, college programs were the only places a track coach could get paid, and the few international-caliber athletes who competed past their college years were either self-coached, stuck around their college program or found a guru of some sort.

But athletes often don't even develop into competitive runners until years after their NCAA careers are over. This means more athletes are depending on post-collegiate coaching to guide their training and development. Some professional athletes stick with their college coach, but the coach's attention is, by necessity, primarily focused on their current team. For those moving on, they can find a number of coaches and programs to join. But if post-collegiate athletes are notoriously poorly paid, then certainly those who coach them aren't paid well either. Some coaches find other ways to pay the bills. Many offer individualized coaching, in person or online, for nonprofessional athletes. You can flip a few pages farther to see that Greg McMillan supplements his coaching by writing magazine columns. The Hanson brothers have a string of running stores. They also are a good example of one of the most stable models for coaches of professional runners -- the sponsored training group.

Coaches with demonstrated success, however, have always been in demand and people will pay for their services. After Arthur Lydiard brought a series of New Zealanders to the Olympic medal stand, he was hired to run a development program in Finland.

Alberto Salazar, Rupp's coach, has reportedly been approached to coach Ethiopia's Bekele brothers, Tariku and Kenenisa. Neither Nike nor Salazar are obligated to support only U.S. athletes, and one would expect a professional coach to follow excellence whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Salazar represents one model available to the very top coaches and athletes today. Shoe company sponsors, like Nike, when signing a big contract with a promising athlete, will also retain a proven coach for them as a way of ensuring their investment. The coach is there to improve the odds that the athlete is healthy, focused and generally acting like a professional. In these cases, the coach comes with the sponsorship; when Mo Farah came to Oregon to join Salazar's group, he left behind an adidas sponsorship and signed with Nike. Manzano's coach, John Cook, is also Nike-funded.

Until they get to this level, however, developing runners are still dependent on the collegiate system. Unfortunately, the career prospects of collegiate coaches (and an entire segment of our athlete development pipeline) are eroding as financially strapped colleges find track a promising place to cut. Individual colleges and universities should hardly be obliged to fund identification and development of Olympic athletes, but we've been counting on them to fill that role for decades, and we should be thinking about what other systems can fill this role. If we can't pay our elite athletes' coaches, someone else will. As long as we care about the performances of the athletes wearing our national uniform, we should care that there are good, motivated coaches willing to take them on.

Supporting coaches, or at least overseeing a system for supporting coaches, is exactly the sort of function USATF should be best for, because there's no other interested party motivated to do it. The USATF Foundation is already gathering data on athletes' incomes, presumably as part of its efforts to improve them. When we set goals to improve our athletes' support systems, let's not leave out the coaches.
