The first thing you want to consider when coaching, is your staff. It's always important to surround yourself with great people. You're staff numbers are going to be different at each level you coach at. The higher levels, the 1-A world, you're going to have twelve people on it. At 1-AA, you're going to have ten people on your staff, from head coach, coordinators, all the way down to what they call GA's, restrict earning coaches. You're going to have a lot of different people on your staff. The dynamics, the personalities, everything's going to be so different on your staff, but you want to have a good mix of older, younger, and in between, as far as age groups to deal with the kids in today's world. It is very important to surround yourself with great people. The chemistry and the staff, because you're going to be working a lot of long hours. There's going to be days where you're going to be happy, going to be sad, you're going to be miserable, you're going to be mad at each other, but at the end of the day, you want to find people that are on the same page, that believe in the same goal, which is to win football games and make a difference in somebody's life if you're at the college level or high school level. At the pros, really it's a business. You're there to win football games. But in the college level, you want to win football games; you want to make a difference in a kid's life. You want to get people that are on the same page, that are on board through thick and thin to accomplish the one goal, and that's to win a lot of games and have fun, and get it done in a professional manner. So find great people, surround yourself with them and you should have a pretty good football team. A lot of people want to know how many coaches and what people actually do on a staff. Obviously you have the head coach who's in charge of your whole program. On the offensive side, you'll have an offensive coordinator, an offensive line coach, a tight end's coach, a quarterback's coach, running back coach, and a wide receiver coach. Defensively you'll have a defensive coordinator, and most of the time, both coordinators will coach a position. You'll have the defensive coordinator, maybe one to two defensive line coaches, a linebacker coach, and defensive back coach, which will make up, depending on what level you coach at, there's anywhere from six to twelve people that make up a coaching staff; not counting the strength staff. You have the head coach in charge, the coordinators, so on down the line to the young coaches on staff, which are graduate assistants or stricter earning coaches and again just like any business or any profession, it starts at the top and the pecking water goes all the way down. Coaching is very different, you don't usually just apply like you would a nine to five job. It's a lot of who you know, paying your dues, and there's going to be times as a young coach where you don't get paid a lot of money and there's a lot of times where you question, "Do I really want to do this?" But my advice to you young coaches out there: It's worth it. Go through it. It's going to make you such a better person. You might not understand it at that point when you're doing these things and you really question yourself, ?What am I doing for not much money?" Hang in there, its well worth it, have a vision, see the light at the end of the tunnel, stay with it.
