You've seen it happen. The head coach assumes the assistant is tracking attendance. The assistant assumes the team manager handles that. The team manager thought they were just bringing the snacks. Three weeks into the season, you discover that nobody has contacted the family whose kid stopped showing up, and now you're fielding an angry phone call from a parent who feels ignored.
This isn't a personnel problem. It's a clarity problem. And it's more common than most directors want to admit.
The Real Cost of Role Ambiguity
When job titles exist without job definitions, three predictable things happen.
First, tasks fall through cracks. Not because people are lazy or incompetent, but because they genuinely don't know certain responsibilities belong to them. The head coach who's running practice, managing game strategy, and communicating with parents will inevitably drop something. When that something lands in the undefined space between roles, it disappears entirely.
Second, the wrong people field the wrong questions. Parents approach whoever seems most available, which usually means whoever responds to texts fastest. That person then becomes the de facto point of contact for everything, regardless of whether they have the information or authority to help. Your carefully recruited team manager ends up answering questions about playing time while your head coach handles requests for the picture day schedule.
Third, and most damaging, your best people burn out. When role boundaries don't exist, the most conscientious volunteers expand to fill every gap. They're the ones staying late, answering messages at 10 PM, and quietly picking up tasks that nobody else noticed needed doing. These are exactly the people you can't afford to lose. And you're losing them because you never told anyone else to share the load.
Why "Figure It Out Together" Doesn't Work
Many directors take a hands-off approach to team-level roles. The thinking goes: we recruited good people, they're all adults, they'll sort out who does what based on their strengths and availability.
This approach has a certain appeal. It feels respectful of volunteers' autonomy. It avoids micromanagement. It acknowledges that every team's dynamic is different.
It also fails constantly.
Here's why: volunteer roles aren't like professional jobs where people negotiate responsibilities through HR processes and org charts. Your head coach, assistant coach, and team manager probably met each other two weeks ago. They might interact primarily through a group text. They have limited time, unclear authority, and no formal mechanism for dividing labor.
Without structure from you, the default outcome is that the head coach does everything important, the assistant shows up when available, and the team manager handles logistics that someone mentions in passing. That's not a team. That's one overworked person with occasional help.
The directors who avoid role definition often think they're being flexible. What they're actually being is absent.
Building Role Definitions That Actually Get Used
Effective role definitions share three qualities: they're specific, they're communicated early, and they're reinforced throughout the season.
Specificity means naming actual tasks, not just describing vibes. "The assistant coach supports the head coach" is useless. "The assistant coach runs warm-ups, tracks attendance at every practice, and is the first point of contact for equipment issues" is something a person can actually do.
Early communication means presenting these definitions during onboarding, before habits form. By week three, your volunteers have already established patterns. Trying to redistribute responsibilities mid-season creates friction and resentment. Get it right from the start.
Reinforcement means bringing role definitions into your regular communication. When you send a mid-season update to coaches, include a reminder about who handles what. When you notice tasks slipping, don't just fix the immediate problem. Reference the role structure and help people recalibrate.
The Three Roles, Defined
Every team needs these three functions covered, whether by three people or two. Here's how to define each one.
Head Coach: The Practice and Game Leader
The head coach owns what happens on the field or court. Their responsibilities cluster around athlete development and team performance.
Core responsibilities include: planning and running practices, making game-day decisions including lineups and substitutions, communicating directly with players about performance and expectations, reporting any safety incidents or concerns to the director, and serving as the program's representative during games and competitions.
The head coach should not be responsible for: tracking who's attending or missing, handling logistics like uniforms and equipment distribution, managing the parent communication channel, or organizing team social events.
When parents approach the head coach with non-coaching questions, the head coach should redirect them: "That's a great question for our team manager, Sarah. She handles all the logistics and she's really on top of it."
Assistant Coach: The Practice Partner and Backup Plan
The assistant coach exists to make the head coach more effective and to ensure continuity when the head coach is unavailable. This role only works when it has defined duties of its own.
Core responsibilities include: arriving early to set up practice equipment and staying late to collect it, running warm-ups and cool-downs to free the head coach for instruction, tracking attendance at every practice and flagging patterns to the head coach, leading specific drill stations during practice when the team splits up, and being fully prepared to run practice or manage a game if the head coach can't be there.
The assistant coach should not be responsible for: making major strategic decisions without the head coach's input, being the primary parent contact, or taking on administrative tasks that belong to the team manager.
The critical point here: assistant coach attendance should be treated as expected, not optional. If assistants only show up when convenient, you don't have an assistant coach. You have occasional help. Build the expectation that assistants commit to a specific percentage of practices and games, negotiate that commitment upfront, and treat it as seriously as you treat head coach attendance.
Team Manager: The Logistics and Communication Hub
The team manager handles everything that isn't coaching. This role is administrative, organizational, and communicative. Done well, it protects the coaches from distraction and gives parents a reliable point of contact.
Core responsibilities include: managing the team communication channel and ensuring messages go out on schedule, distributing and collecting uniforms and equipment, coordinating team snacks, photos, and end-of-season celebrations, answering parent questions about schedules, logistics, and program policies, and escalating concerns to the head coach or director as appropriate.
The team manager should not be responsible for: anything that happens during practice or games, conversations about playing time or player development, or discipline decisions.
One crucial note: the team manager needs to know the boundaries of their role just as clearly as the coaches do. When a parent approaches them with a coaching question, they should redirect confidently: "Playing time questions go to Coach Mike. He's the right person to talk about that with you."
The Handoff Document
Role definitions only work if everyone has them. Create a single-page document that lists all three roles with their specific responsibilities. Distribute this to every volunteer at the start of the season. Include it in your coach orientation. Reference it when conflicts arise.
The document should also include two additional sections.
First, a "gray area" protocol. Certain situations don't fit neatly into any role. A player mentions something concerning to the team manager. A parent corners the assistant coach with a complaint about the head coach. A head coach notices a family might be struggling financially. For each of these, specify who should be notified and how quickly. Gray areas become crises when people don't know whom to tell.
Second, an escalation path. When volunteers encounter something beyond their role, where does it go? Usually, the answer is the head coach first, then the director. But make it explicit. "If you're unsure whether something is your responsibility, ask the head coach. If the head coach is unsure, they ask the director. When in doubt, escalate."
What to Do When Roles Blur
Even with clear definitions, role boundaries will blur during the season. Someone gets sick. Someone's work schedule changes. Someone turns out to be much better at a task you assigned to someone else.
When this happens, resist the urge to just let things evolve organically. Instead, acknowledge the change explicitly. Send a quick message to the team: "Hey everyone, just wanted to confirm that for the rest of the season, Jake is going to handle equipment setup since his schedule works better for early arrival. Maria is shifting to focus on parent communications. Thanks to both of them for being flexible."
This takes thirty seconds and prevents weeks of confusion. It also models something important: that roles are real, that they matter, and that changes to them deserve acknowledgment.
The Director's Role in All This
You might be thinking: this is a lot of structure for volunteer positions. These people aren't employees. Can we really hold them to specific responsibilities?
The answer is yes, but only if you do your part.
Your job as director is to make role success possible. That means recruiting for all three positions, not just hoping the head coach finds help. It means providing the handoff document before the season starts, not after problems emerge. It means checking in mid-season to see if the role division is working. And it means being available when escalation happens.
When directors create clear roles but don't support them, volunteers feel set up to fail. When directors support their volunteers but don't create clear roles, everyone feels overwhelmed. You need both.
Making It Real
Start by auditing your current approach. Do you have written role definitions for head coach, assistant coach, and team manager? Have all your volunteers seen them? When was the last time you referenced them?
If the answer to any of these questions is "no" or "I don't know," you have work to do before next season. Draft the definitions. Share them during onboarding. Build them into your coach orientation materials.
Then watch what happens. You'll see fewer dropped tasks, fewer confused parents, and fewer late-night texts to volunteers who shouldn't be handling those questions anyway. You'll see your best people protected from burnout because they're no longer filling every gap alone.
Clear roles don't constrain your volunteers. They free them to do the specific job they signed up for, and to do it well. That's a program worth running, and a commitment worth keeping.
Ian Goldberg is the CEO of Signature Media and the Editor of the largest and fastest growing sports parenting newsletter. He’s been recognized as an industry expert by the National Alliance for Youth Sports, the US Olympic Committee’s Truesport, and the Aspen Institute's Project Play. Ian is also a suburban NJ sports dad of two teenage daughters and has over 2,000 hours of volunteer time coaching them (which he calls the most fun form of R&D for his newsletter content). Ian and his team provide players, coaches, parents and program directors with the articles and content they need to have a great sports season. Ian has spent most of his career in digital product development and marketing and got his start at the White House where he worked for the economic advisors to two US Presidents.
