Providing Insights on Leadership and Success. Coach Bechler is a John Maxwell Leadership Team Member.
For many of us in the United States, Labor Day is the unofficial end of the summer and is filled with cookouts, pool parties, and college football.
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But Labor Day began as a way to recognize our nation’s workers and their accomplishments.
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The interview process should not be handled lightly by the athletic director and hiring committee. It is a huge opportunity to make a huge decision for the institution.
Recently, I shared an articlerelated to our recent national study with Athletic Directors about the coaching search process. In this article I discussed the focus of questions asked by ADs in the process. But, now I wanted to speak to those of you in those interview rooms, asking the questions.
Here are a few quick tips for making those interviews more effective based on what is working for other ADs around the country:
As a youngster, my dad would serve as a firefighter for the races run at Michigan International Speedway.
M.I.S. was less than 10 miles from my house. My brother and I plus one lucky friend would look forward to the four or five races each summer we’d attend.
This was before the era of luxury boxes and suites, so we’d sit behind pit row with the racer and pit crew families. I got to meet a lot of cool people and collect my share of autographs.
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A formal interview tells you a lot about a coaching candidate.
But it does not tell you everything.
In fact, some of the most useful information in a coaching search comes before and after the interview itself. How a candidate communicates, prepares, follows through, treats people, asks questions, and handles the full process often gives an athletic director a clearer picture of how that person may operate once hired.
The interview is the performance.
The process often reveals the pattern.
“You either get bitter or you get better. It’s that simple. You either take what has been dealt to you and allow it to make you a better person, or you allow it to tear you down. The choice does not belong to fate, it belongs to you.” (Josh Shipp)
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At 27 years of age, I was the youngest women’s basketball head coach at the NCAA level. Four years later, I was allowed to take my talents elsewhere.
How kind of them to let me voluntarily resign.
No matter how you spin it, I was fired.
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Most coaching candidates can talk well about leadership.
They can describe their culture. They can explain their recruiting philosophy. They can talk about accountability, relationships, discipline, communication, and developing student-athletes.
And much of it may be sincere.
11-time NBA Championship coach Phil Jackson said, “The strength of the team is each individual member, and the strength of each member is the team.” As a coach, you understand the importance of building a strong team.
There are plenty of teams that consist of skilled individuals and athletes with tremendous physical assets. However, some of these teams never reach their potential because they are just a bunch of puzzle pieces that don’t seem to fit together.
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Hiring a college coach is one of the most important decisions an athletic director makes.
It is also one of the hardest.
A coach hire affects far more than wins and losses. It shapes team culture, student-athlete experience, retention, department morale, institutional alignment, and the long-term direction of a program.
That is why we recently gathered input from 60 college athletic directors across junior colleges, NAIA programs, and NCAA Divisions I, II, and III for our 2026 College Coaching Search Report. The goal was simple: better understand what athletic directors are experiencing, noticing, valuing, and struggling with in today’s coaching searches.
There’s no doubt that you want a stronger culture and a successful program. This is oftentimes accomplished when you have athletes that are good leaders. This might manifest itself in the form of strong team captains, upperclassmen, or an overall atmosphere of all players taking responsibility for the team’s leadership.
However, whether the leadership on your team is currently where you want it to be or not, you can do something to make it even better.
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Every coaching candidate talks about culture.
They believe in accountability. They care about relationships. They want to recruit high-character student-athletes. They value hard work, trust, discipline, and family.
Those are good words. But in a coaching search, they are not enough.
One of the biggest mistakes an athletic director can make is allowing “culture” to remain vague. When culture becomes a personality impression, the process drifts toward questions like, “Did we like this person?” or “Do they seem like they would fit here?”
Those questions may feel natural, but they are not enough to guide a high-stakes hire.
The better question is this: