While I was at Midwestern State there were regular Assistant Coach meetings. These generally followed the regular Head Coach meetings run by the Athletic Department. Basically, the idea was to ensure that assistants got the information they were supposed to get. Apparently there were some issues with head coaches not passing things along from their meetings.
Imagine that! Head coaches hording information – or simply forgetting to disseminate it to their staff. 🙂
That was the first time I’d been somewhere that had these sorts of meetings just for assistants. At Brown and Rhode Island there were regular general coaching staff meetings where we went over administrative stuff and developments in the area of NCAA rules and compliance. Maybe that served to ensure information was getting out to everyone. MSU didn’t have those.
I’m trying to recall whether there were regular head coach meetings at those schools. For sure they happened periodically. And of course even very senior assistants tend not to be overly welcome at such meetings – no matter if the head coach can’t make it (I did attend those meetings while I was acting head coach at MSU).
That aspect of things aside, I can see the value of having regular meetings for assistant coaches. It’s very easy in college sports for each team to operate in its own little bubble. Even when that doesn’t happen, we tend to operate in different facilities and on conflicting schedules, so our paths don’t necessarily cross readily. Yes, sports that share a facility will naturally tend to interact (like volleyball and basketball), but aside from that, not so much. Meetings like this give the staff a chance to meet and get to know each other a bit. They can also provide a forum for assistants to talk about things at their own level.
Ironically, the date of my first MSU assistants meeting conflicted with team practice, so I couldn’t go. I was there regularly after that, though.
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