Building Your Coach Pipeline: How to Launch a Coach-in-Training Program
Welcome to Racquet Fuel, where we launch into great conversations and share powerful tools to help you become a stronger rackets leader. Your hosts are Kim Bastable, a former All American tennis player and now the director of professional rackets management at the University of Florida, and Simon Gale, the USTA senior director of Racquet Sports Development. Today on Racquet Fuel, Kim and Simon discuss how to develop a coach in training program. With a shortage of pros around the country, why not consider building a pipeline for your next staff members through your own junior program? More now from Kim and Simon.
Episode Narration:Welcome
Kim Bastable:to Racquet Fuel. I'm Kim Bastable here with Simon. Simon and I are going to have a discussion about his program called Coach-in-Training. But as a little backstory to that, we just both very adamantly believe that it's our job as leaders in the industry to inspire the next generation. I think Simon and I could both name many people who have said in the last five years, I've I can't find anyone to work here.
Kim Bastable:I can't find anyone to teach. There's obviously a struggle in the industry, and we would argue that's on us to some extent. It's our job to inspire the next generation. So we're gonna pick apart that subject. And Simon, I'm sure you have many thoughts.
Kim Bastable:What are your top level thoughts before we get into the details?
Simon Gale:Yeah. Agree a 100%. I think it's our responsibility as leaders, directors, senior pros to pass on best practices and inspire, as you say, the next generation. Where that comes from and our approach towards that is critical for for your local facilities who are always looking for for help. And I think I think it's something that all of us could say somebody inspired us and said, you're a good player.
Simon Gale:You should come and help me with my summer camp, or you should come and help with the kids on Friday afternoon, and let's see how you do. I think you could become a coach, whatever that means at that age. And I think we hear those stories all the time. So are we focused on those and making sure we feed that pipeline of young pros and getting them started and showing them that a career potentially is viable and at least presenting it as an option? So looking forward to this conversation.
Kim Bastable:Yeah. So I just a little bit of data behind, that theory that Simon and I have. In 2023, I did a survey where I sent it out on, LinkedIn. It was very unscientific but got lots of responses back. Wanted to know from college and juniors some of their feedback and ideas about the career as well.
Kim Bastable:I asked some current Racquet's professionals for their impressions of their current career. But from the junior perspective, there were 61 responses from 12 different states. They had up to seven years of competitive play, but some were as young low as they just played one or two years. These were people that filled out the survey because someone, you know, a pro at their club probably told them, gave them the link. But what was very telling to me was one of the questions was what career are you most likely to pursue?
Kim Bastable:And 17% said that it was some form of Racquet's industry work. 17%. These are people who are in the Racquet's Club. That's how they got this survey was from their pro and yet 17% is all that said they were planning for some type of Racquet's industry work. And so the next question on the survey was why not?
Kim Bastable:And the why not was multiple answers, but 43% said, I just never thought about it as a career. I claim that's on us. You agree, Simon?
Simon Gale:Yeah. It's not something you go to college for. There's not a formal pathway. Your parents, when you're a teenager and looking at college or you're in college, aren't thinking there's a career in tennis. It's it's what we've always talked about.
Simon Gale:It's the cool job for a while that pays okay until you get a real job. And I think awareness and education around what that pathway looks like, it's out there, but I don't think it's presented to that high school entry level coach as a viable option. It's a summer job or or college job until I go and get my real job, and we got people with passion about something. You already you've got a pool of people who are passionate about the sport. How do we get 10 more percent of of of those college grads to think of a career in tennis?
Simon Gale:How many does that inject into our industry? So, yeah, it's a staggeringly low number, but not surprising.
Kim Bastable:Right. So the other part, you make the point there's no college degree, so to speak. There are professional tennis management programs that do bring this to the college degree type of level, but those are at schools that are in locations that some people may not wanna travel, so there's and there's not very many of those. Another stat from this survey was that sixty percent of the people in this survey did not even know about professional tennis management. So, again, that is an unknown.
Kim Bastable:We do have an episode of Racquet Fuel with Kyle Pipkin who is from the Hope College Professional Tennis Management Program. So I encourage anyone interested in that subject to know more about what that is. So that that is an option, but it's not a common option for for most people. And we want people to really understand it from around the country at the various clubs they have. So what I found interesting was I was passionately talking about this subject only to find out that Simon has done this for twenty years.
Kim Bastable:So it was a brilliant idea to me that was so brilliant. Simon thought it up way before me. So I was excited when I saw, and we will include this in the show notes, he has devised a coach and training program that he used for many years, not at the national campus where he is now but at previous locations. So, yeah, I would just love to get the backstory of why you devised it because as we discussed earlier, having a formal program is really excellent on many fronts. One is that you can put it on a resume and it's not just a I'm just gonna randomly, as a director, ask one or two people to help out in the 10 and Under program, which might be something many clubs do, but it's not formal.
Kim Bastable:You put together a formal program, so tell us why you did that.
Simon Gale:Yeah. The why was simple. I was a director at a new club. It was Yonkers Tennis down in Westchester County, New York. And, you know, even back then, it was the same problem.
Simon Gale:It's where do I find quality help? Where is that coming from? And as a director or general manager, between you, you're investing a lot of time trying to find help. So the low hanging fruit, which there's nothing here that's revolutionary, I don't think. Everybody does it.
Simon Gale:We grab from our high school programs and feed them into a role, and they help out with the Red Bull is to start with or something like that, or they do some hitting sessions because they're they're good players. But I wanted to have a pipeline of people. We we wanted to be able to have a system where these participants in our program, solid high school players playing tournaments, that sort of thing, who just love being at the club. They loved us as a as a staff. They they loved what we stood for, but they love tennis.
Simon Gale:That checks a lot of boxes for why I would hire someone and try and get them to come to my club as a senior pro. You know? I I I want those things as part of their kind of DNA when you're hiring. So the idea was how do we tap into them and create something formal? So think of this as a a pre coach pathway entry level program that starts the pathway for them and exposes a maybe a career.
Simon Gale:I don't think you're thinking of it as a career at that point, but you're being made aware to your point earlier, awareness of what a tennis career could look like. And so we would we would go after these high school players in our program and say, how about we start something we call it coach and training program, the CIT program, which I stole from the summer camp that I used to work at in the nineties. It was called the CIT program. It's a common summer camp graduate from being a camper to a coach and training. And I thought, well, how do we formalize it?
Simon Gale:My my the owner of the club was right behind it and helped formalize it for me, but it was let's present something versus let's say, could you just come and help? And how do we present something that says, here's what you would be required to do just like a job description. Here's the eligibility. Here's the responsibilities. Here's the benefits, and here's what your title is and what you would actually be doing for us.
Simon Gale:And so we worked through this, and we fine tuned it over the course of the ten, twelve years I was there. But it was done out of necessity to say there was three of us who were senior pros working in the summer camp, and our camp grew, and we needed help.
Kim Bastable:Yeah. So that's that sounds like you definitely had the necessity, and you must have had you're you're an organizer. You're a leader. You you had the wherewithal and the knowledge and time to put together the nuts and bolts of of this program. I think that would be my comment that many of the pros out there or directors out there would say, I don't have time to put together such a program.
Kim Bastable:So one is, like I said, we'll put this in the in the show notes, and you can use this framework that, Simon has already put together in general for the nuts and bolts. But how much time did it take? Or as you say, maybe it was less time than you were taking interviewing, trying to find all these other staff people. Like, the people who are right in front of you and taking the time to write this program might have been rather in in relative terms quick.
Simon Gale:I think the balancing act of being a director and hiring and teaching and managing your staff, putting kids in programs, dealing with parents, It's a it's a constant kind of carousel you're on. You're jumping on and off in different roles all the time wearing seven hats. Hiring is one of your number one priorities. So the time we were spending trying to find some help and and advertise for that when right in front of your nose, you've got, I don't know, fifty, seventy five, a 100 players in your high school program who are, 15 to 17 years of age, they're exactly who we need. Like I said, they love your club.
Simon Gale:They love tennis. They love the people who work there, and they've probably done your summer camp or done your program so they already have some insight into how things work. They don't have bad habits. You you're gonna train them in the habits of what you need them to do for your facility, so there's no retraining. It's here's how we do things.
Simon Gale:They know no different. But that time, you can argue, is is equal to the time I was spending interviewing. So it took time to set up and formally put it together and make it look good so that you could put it in front of not just the kids. You put it in front of the parents. You wanted buy in from from the parents to say, well, you're gonna go and work at McDonald's for the summer, or you're gonna have this part time job.
Simon Gale:Let's give them a job that they already would love maybe doing because it's tennis related. And how can we formalize this to a point where what we knew was in high school they needed to do X number of community service hours per year? So if we could service that, write letters of reference, sign off on their community service needs, and then be able to say, well, as a result of this, we're now gonna give you a discount in our programming for the rest of the the year. So if they did a summer for us, then it resulted in a discount for the rest of the year in the in the program. That's a win win situation.
Simon Gale:So there's a bit of bartering and sowing someone involved, but every small club can do that. And I think it's a great way to develop interest in your program. But if it's not formalized, it's just, oh, yeah. We got one or two here. Once it was formalized, it gathered momentum and people paid attention.
Simon Gale:And then all of a sudden, wanted to be in it who was in a in the high school program. And parents talked about it. You put it on a wall. You advertise it. It's on your website.
Simon Gale:And then you start to have parent meetings to educate them on this and what we will do for them and how it brings out self confidence and public speaking and group management and leadership skills. And all of a sudden, you're you're thinking, wow. This is much more than just teaching tennis. You're impacting them as a person, and you see them grow over the course of a summer and say, this young man wouldn't even say hello to me in the mornings. Now he's standing on a bench yelling out and chanting his team name with 50 kids.
Simon Gale:And it's like, what happened to this person? That's the power of of investing in young people. So that's you can tell I'm passionate about it, but that was that was a way for us to help the local community, but from a selfish point of view, help us deliver our program.
Kim Bastable:I know. I think that's what's so cool about it is that, yeah, I think the motivation initially comes from I have to fill these slots. But the great news is that then it turns into such a benefit for the people that are chosen, the the the kids that are chosen or choose to be in the program, and they get the mentoring and the experience of being behind the scenes at a club, probably seeing much more of what a director or a head pro does on a daily basis. It's a challenge. There's a lot of things that are hard, but there's a lot of fun and joy in interacting with the kids.
Kim Bastable:And so it is. It's that great development opportunity. And I I would say that many directors need to realize that developing people, even their full time staff, is a large part of their job. That's really they need to still be pouring into the adult people who are full time on their staff and training them and and encouraging them and not just sending them out to teach lessons and and never really interacting on a training. So it's it's just an extension.
Kim Bastable:We're all coaches. That's where we all start. And so this is coaching these young people to come into our industry. I think the questions, you know, I can hear the pros or the directors out, the listeners saying, I don't have enough time. My club won't allow that.
Kim Bastable:There's not really I don't have that big a program, so I I don't have enough people. What would you, just in general, kinda say to any naysayers?
Simon Gale:I don't know many directors who don't do something like this. Not this formal, but don't tap into some high school players or work with the local high school coach to find summer help, for example. Some I keep saying summer because that's generally where these programs would start. To your point about time, we all wear six or seven hats in these leadership roles, and there's things you have to do. You have to teach.
Simon Gale:You have to train on court. You have to deal with parents. You have to place kids and and adults in programs. They're they're our have tos. We have to do those things.
Simon Gale:Developing people is, for me, a have to. It's number one because the people the coach development piece, and I'm just going through this with with hiring a director of Racquet Sports for the campus, what's most important, and we identified coach development as number one. Developing your people is number one. If you do that well, it impacts the product. And if you train to impact the product, the product results in more people coming, which means the business grows.
Simon Gale:And if you focus on those first two, the business is is the the benefactor, but it's nothing you did special other than develop your people and make sure the programs are well run. So you have to make it a priority. The problem is, Kim, it's not like a lesson that's scheduled. Yes. If it's scheduled at 04:00, I am on the court.
Simon Gale:If if I don't have development of people scheduled, it doesn't happen. So we we talk about it, and we get to it in pieces, but it's not part of my week. And that's where I think we all get lost because we're all so busy. I I get it. I've done that for thirty years.
Simon Gale:It's not easy. But doing things like this, this coach and training program, I think you you can't not do it. You have to make time or get people on your team to make, you know, a couple of senior pros or your assistant director. This is a program. I'll oversee it, but you're gonna drive it.
Simon Gale:And I think that helps develop them as well, but there's nothing more important. Nothing more important.
Kim Bastable:I know. And I can just see this. I don't know. This is me in the creative side. I can see a feeding contest between a couple of those kids out there and a winner of the feeding contest.
Kim Bastable:You teach them to, you know, string rackets as well, and you could have a speed stringing contest between. But just the coach and training swag that you could put together and they wear around the club, they wear when they come to their own clinics that they are a member of this, the pride in that. Certainly, you get to the point where you're interviewing because you have so much demand, which you said over time, you got to the point where people were clamoring to be in the program but you had limited slots, so you might have to do some interviews. And the interview process, the formality of that could be slightly intimidating but highly educational for a student to understand the interview process and learn to answer questions. So I I feel like you could make this very fun.
Kim Bastable:Did you make it fun or was it more businesslike in your environment?
Simon Gale:No. I think it was a combination. It was look, you have to understand this is you're you're contributing to our business, so there's a responsibility. We have paying customers. This is not practice where we goof around a bit more and and and have downtime.
Simon Gale:There's parents watching and they wanna know their kids are are being instructed, they are paying money, so there's an expectation. So you're teaching them that this is their first job for a lot of them. So there's a seriousness to it. And I know, like, PTM schools do a lot of that with, and I know Hope College does a great job with that with Adam and Jorge and and and Kyle there as well now. And there's a there's a, like, heavyweight belt for the winner of the feeding competition and that sort of thing and stringing competition.
Simon Gale:So all of those things were were part of it, and you formalized those too. And a lot of it was made up as we went along, and then it became let's go out for an end of season dinner and an awards night. And it became, alright. We're gonna give a scholarship now, a full ride for the next session, which was an eighteen week session, which was worth a lot of money, to the CIT of the year, and you got a free ride through the program. Well, what family doesn't want a free ride for their tennis program?
Simon Gale:So it evolved. And and as you said, the creative juices flow, you start to say, well, let's add this. Let's make this. Let's put it on the wall with pictures and bios, and let's maybe get a sponsor. Could we get a local sponsor to help them with some potential funding towards their first year of college or to help them buy rackets or whatever it was.
Simon Gale:You you could make this much bigger than than it than it is, but I think that's only limited to the creativity of the director and the club.
Kim Bastable:So I think it will be fun on this. Well, we we really wanna hear some some feedback from listeners on this and some ideas. We'll put, Simon and I will have social media posts out about this. And we wanna know what your ideas have been and maybe get a conversation going to share more of these ideas because probably many of you out there are already doing this. But the idea is that, you know, there is a format that, you know, Simon has somewhat already created.
Kim Bastable:Adopting something and making it formal is probably fairly simple to move to order a couple t shirts and put together some structure on on the hours and have maybe an administrative hour here and there where you're you're learning extra and you're doing leadership development. I can see this being a very large thing, as you said, where you have awards banquets and maybe scholarships and and further prizes and supporting businesses, but I can I can see the benefits being even small if if it's formalized? And I think the encouragement here would be to formalize because you are probably doing some situation like this already, but the formalization of it allows for there to be recognition. You could talk about it on your social media. You could talk about it on the wall of your pro shop.
Kim Bastable:You can get these parents excited about the careers in the racket sports industry. So many good things can come from more formalized coach and training.
Simon Gale:Well, Kim, as you say that, I think about it would be like coaching a class at your club and not having it on your website or not having it on your flyer. It's something that's a bit of a secret. No one knows about As soon as you formalize it and put a blurb about it and sell it on on online, it goes from four people to eight to 12, and suddenly you've got 50 people in your program. That's all this is. It's formalizing and saying most websites say, you know, careers at our club or employment opportunities.
Simon Gale:Well, this is the this is one of them. And I I don't think that's difficult. You just have to commit to it and see long term benefits. And, ultimately, it's not just about your club. Hopefully, these people decide to stay in the industry at some point or come back to it after college, for example, and maybe work at your club or go on and work somewhere else.
Simon Gale:But if we're all doing this and injecting people into the industry, then the industry is gonna be ultimately healthier. With great formal education through through the teaching bodies and and now USTA coaching and you could be doing coach fundamentals or, play facilitator workshops, you know, there's a pathway for them. And I think that's important.
Kim Bastable:Yeah. So let's just talk quickly about compensation models. You mentioned community service hours were something that was an initial driver, So that would probably mean that they did not get paid. But then you said at a certain you had different levels, a junior, senior, and then an assistant pro. So they after they'd been there and earned their way up, talk a little bit about your your levels that you had.
Simon Gale:Yeah. We broke it out into three distinct sessions per year. So you didn't get to just come when you wanted. You you committed like a job, and we had two eighteen week sessions from the fall to January and then kind of February to June, and then we had the summer camp for ten weeks. So you had to make a commitment to a session, and maybe you came twice a week for an hour and a half or something like that, or you came on the weekend for three hours in a row, and you had to do a certain number of hours in a session to move on to the next level.
Simon Gale:So it was junior, senior, and then assistant pro. The junior and senior CITs didn't get paid. It serviced their community service requirements, which was at least twenty or forty hours, something like that. But we also, in lieu of that, gave them discounts on programs if they completed a session, discounts on, say, stringing or pro shop items, or it was you could take a a private lesson once a month with your favorite pro. You just found ways to to reward them.
Simon Gale:But once they showed that they could turn up on time and formally, actually physically finish a session, if we, as a group of pros, agreed that this was someone we wanna invest in, then we would graduate them to this assistant pro level, and that's when we started compensating. And it still might have only been minimum wage, but it was minimum wage plus discounts on programs and those other things we would also offer. So it was a pathway for compensation, and then several of them would end up being summer helpers for a couple of years in high school and then would continue in the fall session or winter sessions. And then when I went to college, they came and helped us every summer for ten weeks. And you had them for five or six years, and they got quite good.
Simon Gale:By the time they were two or three years in, they were getting the hang of it, they added real value. It wasn't just we need you to go and help someone on the Red Bull Court and just teach the little kids because because that's all we need you to cover. They had meaningful impact in the in the role as they evolved. So compensation was part of it, but as a manager and owner, it was also cheaper labor versus paying someone 30 or $40 an hour for summer camp help. And I think expenses are something where payroll is something we're always managing.
Simon Gale:So it was a trade off that worked very well, and it was a win win situation.
Kim Bastable:Yeah. I I think that's a good explanation of the different levels and how you did it. I actually also think it's really important as we develop businesses to pick the brains of this generation and ask them, you know, how social media works for them, how they you know, they have some unique skills because they're on it constantly. Some of them are quite good at video editing and can do some skills that some of us that are older struggle more with. So I I feel like it's really interesting to to ask them that and to get to that relationship where we're really, from a business sense, sharing the business challenges and then asking them, you know, how do you think we should reach this market?
Kim Bastable:What would be the best way to communicate with that group? I just think it enlightens us if we bring some of these sharp young people into our wheelhouse and in a business sense.
Simon Gale:I see it here when we have the fellows here. They just left, and we had them here for twelve weeks. And you would sit and have lunch with them. And, of course, they're 20, thirty years younger, so they they think differently and look at life a little differently than than we did at that age, I think, and add value. So absolutely, Kim, but I also think they can add value in a program like this.
Simon Gale:Social media wasn't as big in 2005 as it is now. There's opportunities for them to contribute to your social media pages in these roles too. So, I think, again, you said it earlier, it's it's limited to how creative you are. And if you take time to think and stop and think about how you can utilize young people, there's a lot of options versus, well, they don't know what they're doing yet. They're young, or they don't like to work hard.
Simon Gale:This generation doesn't work hard. I don't believe in that at all. I think it's just they work a little different than we did, and I think you've got to tap into that that resource.
Kim Bastable:Yep. Tap into that. Lead them a little. Guide them. Excite them.
Kim Bastable:That's that's where I definitely think we should spend spend some effort and time. Great discussion, Simon. Appreciate that. And I think we'll be very interested to hear what kind of feedback we get from our listeners. So please supply those ideas.
Kim Bastable:Look at the show notes for this, sort of I d this format that Simon has created for his his club. But come up with your own ideas. Be creative. Let's get this next generation fired up. That's what we have for you today on Racquet Fuel.
Kim Bastable:We'll speak to you next time.
Episode Narration:That's all for today, but we're not out of fuel. You can find more information and resources in our show notes and by visiting racquetfuelpodcast.com. If you liked what you just heard, please subscribe. And also leave a review, which helps other people join the mission to become stronger Racquet's leaders.
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