The decision about which coaches are coming back next season is one of the most consequential a director makes, and most directors end up making it under the worst possible conditions. It lands at the end of a long season when everyone is tired, gets made largely from memory so that the most recent thing a coach did looms far larger than the ten months before it, and tends to drift toward criteria like wins, parent popularity, and personal rapport rather than whether the coach aligns with your program and develops your athletes. Worse, it usually gets made as a simple binary, keep or cut, which erases the two outcomes that often matter most.
The problem here is less that directors make bad calls about their coaches and more that the call gets made without a fair, consistent process, so it ends up driven by recency, rapport, and gut instead of evidence weighed against the standards your program actually holds. A scorecard fixes that, and it does something else just as important: it replaces keep-or-cut with four real options, retain, retrain, move, or do not invite back, so a coach worth developing does not get cut and a coach in the wrong role does not get mistaken for one who cannot do the job.
One thing to be clear about before the tool itself. The scorecard is a fair read of fit and alignment against the standards you set, built so you can keep and develop as many strong coaches as possible and make the genuinely hard calls cleanly when they are truly needed. Sorting coaches into good people and bad people is simply not what it does. Ricky Reyes, the program director at CLA Lacrosse, frames the underlying principle as standards above star power: a coach who operates outside the program's system, however much they win, tends to create short-term gains and long-term turmoil, and tends to move on eventually anyway. The standard, in his framing, has to apply to everyone or it stops being a standard. A scorecard is how you apply it evenly.
The 5 Things the Scorecard Measures
Score each coach on five factors using a simple scale, a 1 to 3 or a low, solid, high, and resist the urge to let one strong factor or one bad memory swamp the rest. The whole point of scoring all five is to see the entire coach rather than the loudest moment.
Alignment With Your Standards
Does the coach operate inside your program's system, values, and non-negotiables, or work around them when it suits a result? This is the factor Ricky weights most heavily, because a coach who bypasses the standard, even a winning one, erodes the thing that holds the program together. A high score here is a coach who upholds the standard whether or not anyone happens to be watching.
Athlete Development and Experience
Are the kids on this coach's teams getting better, and do they want to keep playing? Look past the win-loss record at whether players are building real skills and staying engaged across the season. A coach can win with talent they did not develop, so the question worth answering is what happened to the athletes rather than what happened on the scoreboard.
Communication With Families
Does the coach keep families informed before problems arrive, or do parents learn where their kid stands only once something has gone wrong? Proactive communication prevents most of the conflicts that otherwise land on your desk. A coach who tells families what is coming before it gets there is doing genuine program work, the sort that reaches well beyond the team itself.
Coachability and Growth
When you give this coach feedback, do they take it and get better, or stay exactly where they are? This is the most important factor for telling a retrain situation apart from a harder call, because a coach who grows is a coach worth investing in. The willingness to be coached is itself a coaching qualification.
Reliability and Follow-Through
Does the coach show up prepared, do what they said they would, and hold the basics together week after week? Reliability is unglamorous, and it is the floor that everything else stands on top of. A brilliant coach you cannot count on tends to cost you more than a steady one you can.
From Scores to a Decision
Add the picture up across all five factors, and the overall pattern rather than any single number points you toward one of four moves.
Retain, and Say So
A coach who scores high across the board is exactly who you want back, and the tool's real job here is making sure you actually tell them so. Strong coaches get courted by other programs, and a director who only talks to a coach when there is a problem leaves their best people feeling unseen. Retention starts with the coaches you are not the least bit worried about.
Retrain
A coach who scores high on alignment and coachability but low on one specific, fixable skill is a clear investment rather than a problem to remove. The gap is a skill or a systems gap you can close with feedback, a mentor, or a clearer expectation, and that high coachability score is your signal the investment will actually take. Most coaches who get cut on gut feel belong right here.
Move
Sometimes the scores reveal a strong coach sitting in the wrong seat: terrific with high schoolers and underwater with seven-year-olds, or better suited to an assistant role than the head job they currently hold. The person is right and the role is the mismatch, so the fix is a different seat rather than an exit.
Don't Invite Back
When a coach scores persistently low on alignment, and fair feedback over a real stretch of time has not closed the gap, the honest call is not to invite them back. Handled with respect, this serves everyone involved, the coach included, who is better off in a program that fits them than stuck in one that does not. In Ricky's framing, no one is too big for the standard, and that cuts both ways: holding the line is also how you stay fair to every coach who does meet it.
Run It Before You Need It
The scorecard only works if you run it with runway. Score your staff well before any renewal conversations, because retrain and move both need lead time, and no coach can close a skill gap or learn a new age group in the final week of the season. Running it late collapses your four options back into the very binary you were trying to escape, since keep-or-cut is all that remains when there is no time left to develop or reassign anyone. This week, score your current staff on the five factors, even roughly. The patterns that surface will tell you which conversations to start now and which coaches to go thank.
What a Coaching Staff Actually Is
A coaching staff is the program, more than any facility or logo, and the decisions you make about who gets to coach it deserve better than memory and gut. A scorecard does not make those decisions for you. What it does is make them fair, give you the runway to act on them, and ensure your strongest coaches know they are wanted while the harder calls get made cleanly and early. Your coaches are professionals, and a fair, evidence-based process is how you treat them like it.
