By Ben Rohrbach, USA TODAY High School Sports
USA TODAY High School Sports is a partner of High School Football America
It seems coaching high school football in hotbeds such as Southern California and Florida can be just as demanding as the NFL or NCAA, according to numbers reported by a recruiting service for coaches.
A whopping 114 of the 601 high schools in Southern California changed head football coaches this offseason, according to Eight Laces Consulting founder Chris Fore, who has served as an athletic director for six years in the past and is a special teams coach at Sultana High. He also is on the board of the California Coaches Association.
There were 114 Head Football Coach changes in So Cal. 2 schools changed Head Coaches TWO times this off season. So, let’s make that 116!!
— Chris Fore (@CoachFore) June 28, 2016
Hacienda Heights (Calif.) Wilson’s recent announcement of Ryan Bateman completed the hiring of all 114 head coaches, per Fore, a turnover rate of 19 percent among all available such jobs in SoCal.
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Believe it or not, that number is actually low compared to high school football head coaching jobs in Florida, where an estimated 129 of the 560 available jobs turned over since Aug. 1, 2015, according to FloridaHSFootball.com.
We have had 128 changes so far going back to August 1. Counts for about 23% of the programs (560 teams) we have. https://t.co/u7slQOV3zD
— Florida HS Football (@FlaHSFootball) June 28, 2016
Those numbers fall in line with the turnover rates for higher levels of football, where one might think the job is more demanding. At the college level, 24 of the 128 Football Subdivision Series schools (19 percent) changed head coaches from 2015 to 2016. Likewise, the NFL will roll out seven new head coaches for the second consecutive fall, a year-to-year turnover rate of 22 percent.
Is a prioritization of winning over character-building at fault for these high turnover rates? Are the demands of the job so high that coaches are being burned out quicker than ever? Or is an older generation giving way to younger coaches in a new era of football? These are all questions the coaches associations in Florida, Texas and every state should begin asking themselves.
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