Coaches and families learn to live under spotlight's glare

Published: Sunday, August 25, 2002

During football season, which officially begins in early August and seemingly never ends, Marty McClintock spends upwards of 14 hours a day at Plainview High School.

When he's not on the field, he breaks down film or assembles coach's meetings or examines his playbook or analyzes film again. There's always something to do to ensure his team will be better the next day. And the day after that.

Fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. A former math teacher, even McClintock can lose track.

"We quit counting a long time ago," said Jodie McClintock, Marty's wife of 14 years. "I don't think you can add up the hours if you count the hours he spends here (at home) thinking and coaching in his sleep.

"It pretty much goes 24-7."

For Marty McClintock, and every other coach across the state, coaching isn't so much a job as it is a way of life. Heightened demands and expectations to win create unseen pressure, which can sometimes blur the line of where work ends and home life begins.

Like it or not, though, head football coaches — and their families — work and live in clear view of the public eye. Their job is unique, unlike that of 9-to-5 office dwellers, who work in the security of anonymity.

When was the last time a banker or an accountant was heckled in his office for a split-second job decision?

For most coaches, though, the admitted pressure — whether perceived or real — is simply a byproduct of a job they love.

"I'd rather have our stands full of people cursing me on the sidelines than I would not have anybody up there," said Brad Davis, who has been an assistant for 17 years at Frenship under his father, Bobby. "Even those guys that think they know everything on Saturday morning. That's better than not having anybody in the stands watching you play.

"I think all that pressure is what makes our game so great in the state of Texas."

It can also make for a career of uncertainty. Turnover is an inevitable fact of the profession. A coach's tenure is almost directly tied to his ability to produce winning teams on a yearly basis.

Of the 88 schools in The Avalanche-Journal's coverage area in Texas, 15 head coaches have held their post at the same school 10 or more years.

Only two of those — Frenship's Bobby Davis and Plains' Larry McMinn — have stayed 20 or more years at the same school.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, 45 of the area's coaches — or 51 percent — are in their first or second year at their respective schools. The number is indicative of an alarming trend. Rare is the coach who nests at one school for very long anymore.

"When you're in coaching, you're basically just like a migrant," Abernathy head coach Dewayne Sexton said. "You move from one place to another."

And not always by choice. The "Win now" mentality that permeates today's society has little patience for losing. A coach has a five-year plan for success? Better make it three.

Because if a coach isn't putting pressure on himself, then it's coming from a superintendent or a school board or the local townspeople.

Rumors of fans posting "for sale" signs in a head coach's front lawn often surface. Sexton has received hang-up calls at his home in the past.

"That can happen to just about anybody," he said. "We're trying to be in the community like anybody else, but not everybody is going to be pleased with what you do. We put our work on display every Friday night. A lot of times, even if you win that's not good enough."

Too often coaches are seen as commodities that can be replaced on a whim. Sexton, who has coached for 28 years, has been in the business long enough to know that if he doesn't produce victories, there could be a less expensive alternative.

"I know the opinion of superintendents and boards and their bottom line is they've got to put a product out there," Sexton said. "They've got to balance budgets. We max out our money at 20 years. We don't get any more. We're pretty high-priced compared to a young guy that's five years in.

"You start looking around at the trends. Most superintendents aren't going to admit it, but they would really prefer to have a guy that's got 5-10 years in the business that maybe hasn't been a head coach before. If a guy works out and wins a lot of games, they got more bang for their buck that way.

"It's unfortunate. You feel you're at the top of your game and at a lot of places you're viewed as a liability."


Most coaches contend that the pressure from outsiders is nothing compared to what they expect of themselves. Their inside drive to succeed and serve as a positive role model for their players is an unceasing source of motivation, almost to absurd proportions.

McClintock, who is entering his fourth year as head coach at Plainview, estimates his typical work week during the season runs anywhere between 90-100 hours. It's not uncommon for him to leave the house at 7 a.m. and not return until 9 or 9:30 p.m.

He works like this seven days a week, reserving only Wednesday nights to spend with his wife and 9-year-old son, Wade. Wednesday is McClintock's transition day, when he can reflect on three days of practice and look forward to junior varsity and varsity games.

"I've caught myself standing on the edge of the driveway staring and taking deep breaths hoping everything goes well," McClintock said. "There's not much time to regroup, it's full go. For just a few hours, I'm so grateful to have that time on Wednesday evening."

But McClintock, like many others on the South Plains, walks a delicate line as a head coach in a one-school town. He is one of the most recognizable figures in Plainview, which makes his family just as vulnerable.

On Friday nights, Jodie McClintock is very particular about where she sits: at the very top of the bleachers with her back to fence.

"You don't hear quite as much," she explained.

Both Marty and Jodie McClintock realize public criticism comes with the territory. As the years have passed, Jodie has learned to absorb negative comments directed toward her husband.

It's her son she worries about.

"He hears things," said Jodie, a librarian at Plainview's fifth-grade campus. "There's a lot of prestige and attention with being the head coach's son. He likes the attention. But he's realizing there's some pressure and maybe some negative attention sometimes.

"You can't protect him from it. We try to teach him to be positive, that not everybody agrees with what Daddy does. We always teach him to be proud of who he is and his dad and to always be on his best behavior because people are looking at him."

This is the pressure Marty McClintock feels the most — to do well for his family and to do well for his assistant coaches and their families.

The livelihood of his assistants sometimes depends on his success as a head coach.

"There's a lot of families involved," said McClintock, who brought along four assistants and their families when he moved from Borger to Plainview. "Our kids go out in the community, our kids go to school. You don't think they know who the head coach's kid is when they walk in a store and who's my wife? Or when they sit there on Friday night and I make the dumbest call and they tell that to my 9-year-old son, that your daddy is stupid? If that's not pressure, then you tell me what is.

"The pressure comes from, can my family handle this because of what I'm doing?"


Marc Lochbaum, who is beginning his third year as an assistant professor of sports psychology at Texas Tech, said the mental pressure involved with coaching can be debilitating.

He knows first hand. Lochbaum worked as an assistant coach for the men's basketball team at Scottsdale (Ariz.) Community College for four years while earning his doctorate degree at Arizona State University.

After he received his degree in 1998, Lochbaum worked as a sports psychologist for the ASU women's basketball team for the 1999-2000 season.

"The intention can be really personal and not for the team," Lochbaum said of coaching. "When people are trying to coach and win to move up, that's a lot of self-induced pressure."

The result can be a downward spiral of habit-forming behavior.

"It's hard to always win," Lochbaum said. "It turns into some bad health habits, like staying up too late. When you stay up too late you eat too much food. Or when you commiserate over losing, you go have a beer. Or to calm your nerves, you smoke a cigarette."

Lochbaum suggests that coaches, like athletes, can suffer from entrapment, which occurs when a coach remains in the business not for the pure joy of it, but simply because he has invested too much time to quit and knows no alternative.

Thomas D. Raedeke of East Carolina University and Tracy L. Granzyk and Anne Warren of University of Colorado wrote an academic article on why coaches experience burnout.

In the article, which was published in 2000 in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, an academic quarterly, they state that social expectations create feelings of obligation for coaches.

"An individual who has been involved with coaching for many years may become identified by family and friends as a coach," the authors wrote. "In turn, a coach may feel that others see him or her in that role and thus feel obligated to stay in that role because of others' expectations."

The authors' research linked a correlation between high commitment levels to their job and eventual burnout. The daily stress of the job isn't so much of a factor leading to burnout as the coach's commitment level.

"Burnout seems to occur when individuals who are highly committed to a given activity or profession become disillusioned with their involvement," they wrote in the article."


Mark Cotton doesn't consider himself burned out or even disillusioned. But maybe that was the point, to get out of the profession before he ever felt that way.

After toiling in the profession for 24 years, including the last 10 as head coach at Stanton, Cotton is now the school's principal. He made his decision in May and it became official in July, one month before two-a-day practices started.

While he still incurs stress in his new role, Cotton admits he grew weary of the coaching life.

"I thought it was a good professional deal for me at the time," said Cotton, who compiled a 71-20 record at Stanton and guided the Buffaloes to the 1997 Class 2A state championship, a 33-7 victory over Rogers. "It's different types of stress and different types of hours. I've been doing it (coaching) for 24 years. It's nice to know I'm going to be able to walk out of the office door at 5 p.m. and come home. As a head football coach, you couldn't do that."

Cotton's family played a large factor in his decision, specifically his three children. Becky, 22, is working on a master's degree in speech therapy at Tech, where Jon, 19, will start his sophomore year. Mallory, 14, the youngest of the three, is a freshman at Stanton.

All of Cotton's children were involved in athletics, making it easier for him to spend time with them as a head coach. He might have pursued a career change sooner if not for his desire to coach Jon through his senior year in 2000.

Cotton can't guarantee he won't wind up coaching again in the near future, but he doesn't regret his decision.

"We were able to arrange our children's lives around athletics and I don't know that everybody can do that," said Cotton, who handed the head coaching position to former assistant Larry Tate. "My children are all in athletics and we're all involved. But it gets old. It gets old knowing every Saturday and Sunday I'm going to put in multiple hours during the work week."


The long hours are an unspoken prerequisite of the job, even if the salary isn't commensurate.

"If you're coaching for money, you're in the wrong profession," Denver City head coach Terry Summers said. "You can go mow lawns for a month and make the money coaches make."

Most coaches are given a stipend of varying amounts, depending on the school.

At Denver City, Summer's assistants earn $3,000 on top of their teaching salaries to coach football. It may seem like a lot for four months of work, but Summers argues otherwise.

If his assistants are putting in 60-80 hours per week — and maybe more — the hourly wage "just doesn't make sense," Summers said.

McClintock has taken steps to help ease that strain for his coaches. Prior to this season, McClintock and his staff were not being compensated for the 10 days of practice prior to the first day of school.

McClintock lobbied the school's principal for a change, reasoning that his coaches are working and educating kids even if school has not officially opened.

So starting this year, Plainview coaches, including volleyball and cross country coaches, received a daily pay rate calculated off the state base salary table, which outlines the minimum yearly salary for teachers under a 10-month contract.

For example, the state base pay for a teacher with 10 years of experience is $33,730. To figure the daily rate, that number is divided by 187 (the number of days of a teacher's annual service).

In this example, it would be $180.37 per day, which is then multiplied by 10 to figure the sum a coach receives for those 10 days.

The same plan will be implemented for coaches who work during holiday breaks, such as basketball and baseball coaches. McClintock said it is a common practice among schools in the state and a useful tool to help build stability and consistency within the coaching staff.

"I felt like that was important," McClintock said. "I felt like we had the support from administration and the school board to pursue that and I'm very grateful for that."

In the end, though, money is never the overriding factor for coaches to enter the profession. For most, the opportunity to teach and develop a lasting bond with players and fellow coaches far outweighs the pressure involved.

"It's just a game," Summers said. "It really is just a game played by a bunch of kids. I tell these coaches, leave it here. Don't let the pressure get to you.

"If you put it on yourself, then you're doing it to yourself. You're going to drive yourself out of a profession that's one of the greatest in the world."