Questions to Ask Coaches
Questions for an experienced coach about how they plan practice, cut players, handle parents and difficult athletes, survive a season, and what they have changed their mind about. For newer coaches, assistants, and anyone learning the job from someone further along.
The questions
Open any question for the note
What did your first season look like, and what would you throw out of it now?
Why ask it
Experienced coaches are usually blunt about their early years, and the discards are the lesson: too many drills, too much talking, borrowed systems. It also gives a newer coach permission to admit what is not working.
How do you plan a practice on paper before you get to the field?
Why ask it
Ask to see the actual sheet. Time blocks, who runs each station, what gets cut when the session runs long, this is the craft, and it is rarely written about in the way a working coach will explain it.
How do you decide what not to coach this season?
Why ask it
Every coach has more to teach than there are hours. Hearing what a veteran deliberately leaves out, and how they chose, is more useful than hearing their full curriculum.
What do you say to a player you are cutting?
Why ask it
The words matter and most coaches remember theirs. Listen for whether they give a reason, whether they say what would have to change, and whether they do it in person, which is where most people fail.
How do you handle the athlete who is talented and bad for the group?
Why ask it
This is the recurring test of a coach's stated values. The answers divide sharply between those who set a line in advance and those who negotiate it weekly, and the second group usually loses the room.
Where do you draw the line on how much of your athletes' lives this sport gets?
Why ask it
Off season demands, holidays, other sports, and school work all pull the same hours. A coach with a clear limit will state it in hours and days, and will describe what they gave up to hold it.
How do you keep parents useful rather than hostile?
Why ask it
Ask for the mechanism: a preseason meeting, a rule about waiting a day after games, a policy that the athlete raises the issue first. General appeals to communication mean the coach is improvising each time.
What do you do in the first ten minutes after a loss?
Why ask it
The habit here shapes a team more than any speech. Some coaches say nothing on purpose, some go straight to specifics, and hearing why they made that choice is genuinely instructive.
How did you learn to hold the attention of a room of teenagers?
Why ask it
Most coaches will say some of it is repetition, but the specific tricks, standing where the sun is not, speaking once and moving, using names constantly, are learnable and rarely taught.
When do you decide a player is not going to get a particular skill, and what do you change then?
Why ask it
This is a hard, honest question about limits. Good answers involve changing the role rather than lowering the standard, and being straight with the athlete about it.
What conversation do you still get wrong?
Why ask it
The value is in the specificity. Coaches who can name their weak conversation, telling a senior they will not start, talking to a family about an eating problem, are still working on the job.
How do you manage an assistant who wants your job?
Why ask it
Ambition in a staff is normal and rarely discussed. Listen for whether they give the assistant real responsibility or keep them away from it, since that choice tends to explain how staffs fall apart.
What do you do when your director or board asks for something you think is bad for the athletes?
Why ask it
Ask for the example. How a coach handled a scheduling demand, a fundraising expectation, or pressure to play someone tells you how much of the job is politics and how they survive it.
How do you handle the parts of the job with no coaching in them, the budget, the buses, the paperwork?
Why ask it
This is what buries new coaches. Practical answers include a template, a delegated parent, a fixed hour each week, rather than doing it late at night when it is already overdue.
What is your rule about coaching your own child?
Why ask it
Almost every coach at youth or school level faces this. The workable answers involve a third party evaluating that child, an agreement made with the family in advance, and being explicit with the team about it.
How do you keep your own health and household intact during a season?
Why ask it
Coaching seasons wreck sleep and family time, and the people who last have systems: a day that is protected, a phone rule, an assistant who takes certain calls. Vague answers here often come from people who burned out once.
What have you had to unlearn in the last ten years?
Why ask it
Practices around water, conditioning as punishment, head injuries, and how young athletes are spoken to have all changed. A coach who cannot name something they abandoned may still be coaching on old assumptions.
Which of your coaching habits came from a coach you did not like?
Why ask it
This gets at how coaching is inherited. Nearly everyone carries something from a coach who treated them badly, and noticing it is what stops them passing it on.
How do you know when it is time to leave a program?
Why ask it
The signals coaches describe, dreading the drive, arguing with the same parents, no longer learning, are concrete and worth knowing before you need them. It is also a franker conversation than asking about career plans.
What do you want an athlete to be able to do at thirty because they played for you?
Why ask it
This asks for a claim about outcomes far beyond wins, and it exposes whether a coach's stated purpose is real. The specific answers, sit through discomfort, take a correction, show up on time for someone else, are usually the honest ones.
Learning from an experienced coach
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Ask to watch, not just to talk
The most useful thing a veteran coach can give you is thirty minutes on the sideline of their practice, followed by ten minutes afterwards where you ask why they did three specific things. Watching removes the risk that you both stay at the level of philosophy. Offer to help set up, stay out of the way, and write your questions during the session rather than interrupting it.
Make the questions narrow
- Ask about one decision, in one game or one week, rather than about their approach in general.
- Ask for the artifact: the practice plan, the parent letter, the first team meeting agenda. Coaches will usually share these.
- Ask what they cut, not what they include. Subtraction is where their judgment lives.
- Ask what they were wrong about. It gives them room to be honest and gives you something usable.
What not to spend the time on
- Their record, which you can look up.
- Generic requests for advice, which produce generic answers.
- Anything about specific current athletes, which they should not discuss with you.
- Asking them to evaluate your own athlete, unless that is why you are meeting.
Close the loop
Try one thing they described, then tell them what happened, including if it went badly. Coaches keep talking to people who report back, and the second conversation is usually more candid than the first. If they gave you a document or an introduction, say what you did with it.