Today's Tidbit... Too Many Coachers

American football began as a club sport. The captain led the team in all matters, and he and other experienced players taught the newbies the fundamentals of the game. There were no coaches.

Three coaching trends emerged as the game grew in popularity and spread nationwide. First, the top Eastern schools often had the previous year's captain remain on campus to instruct the following year's team. He commonly received assistance from former players who lived in the area or returned to campus before the big game. They taught the fine points of football to individual players. Relying on recent graduates and periodic volunteer assistants to coach teams became known as the graduate system.

Second, colleges not among the top Eastern schools hired and paid recent Eastern players to handle their teams, allowing the Yale or Princeton system gospel to spread to the hinterland. Some of those paid coaches proved successful, leading to the professional coaching model. Third, beginning in the late 1880s, Americans began referring to these instructors as coachers or coaches, terms they borrowed from the British.

Regardless of the terms used to describe the coachers, the graduate system became the norm in the East, while the professional model took root elsewhere, but the graduate system ultimately proved problematic for several reasons. One was that the previous year's captains lacked the experience and perspective of experienced coaches. They knew the approach and techniques taught at their alma mater and little else. Also, since they coached for only a year or two, they focused on the team's short-term success, not preparing the team for the longer-term. I argue in an upcoming book about the early forward pass that the graduate system's parochial and short-term perspective contributed to East Coast teams making little use of the forward pass in the first decade following its adoption. Carlisle and Springfield College were Eastern exceptions; both had professional coaches.

Of course, another reason the graduate system struggled was the inability of recent captains to control the alums who showed up to coach. Those who lived in town might assist regularly and provide coaching consistent with the nominal head coach's directions, but many showed up as they wanted, teaching what they know rather than what the head coach wanted.

The challenges of having too many and uncoordinated crews of coaches on the field appeared as early as 1893 when the "too many cooks" analogy appeared for the first of many times.

('Ten Coachers,' Boston Globe, October 13, 1893.)

---

The free preview ends here. Read the rest of this article and the 1,200 articles in the archives with a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year).

---