The Value of Head Coaching Experience

Is the level of coaching experience more important than head coaching experience?

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a column for a women’s basketball website suggesting women’s college basketball coaches and women’s college basketball in general would improve if Power 4 assistant coaches took low-major or mid-major head coaching jobs before taking over P4 programs rather than moving directly from P4 assistant to P4 head coach. There are obvious success stories and missteps with both approaches, but, as I wrote:

“Rather than continue as an assistant coach and eventually jump straight into the deep end at a BCS program and sink or swim, why not take a mid-major job? Get the deliberate practice required to reach a level of mastery at a lower-profile program and jump to a P4 program after accumulating hours and hours of deliberate practice.…”

This week, after leaving the University of Arizona, SMU Head Coach Adia Barnes made headlines by saying:

"If you look across the country, if you look at all the recent hires, they've all hired mid-major under-qualified people, because they don't really care.”

Now, I agree some athletic directors make hires that suggest they do not know or care about women’s basketball, but these are largely at universities to which nobody pays attention, not SEC and Big 12 programs. The mid-major head coaches who have filled P4 jobs this spring are Grand Canyon’s Molly Miller (Arizona State); Buffalo’s Becky Burke (University of Arizona); Oral Roberts’ Kelsi Musick (Arkansas); and Norfolk State’s Larry Vickers (Auburn). Three of the hires were met enthusiastically by many, while only Arkansas was met with skepticism.

Burke countered that she could have started as a P4 assistant due to her college coach, Louisville’s Jeff Walz, but wanted the challenge of working her way up from the bottom, as she started her head coaching career at an NAIA (Emery-Riddle), then NCAA D2 (Charleston), and eventually NCAA D1 at USC Upstate and Buffalo before Arizona. I am unaware of another recent P4 coach who leveled up three times before reaching a P4, although Miller and Musick were NCAA D2 head coaches before reaching D1.

Barnes has a right to her opinion, but the others earned their P4 head coaching jobs through demonstrated head coaching success (Vickers spent 9 years as the Norfolk St. HC), whereas Barnes was hired as the head coach at Arizona, her alma mater, after a WNBA playing career and five seasons as an assistant coach at one program. Different paths, and both can lead to success, but it is hard to argue Barnes deserved the position more than the others or that she was more prepared to be a P4 head coach when hired.

I have not researched the coaching paths of every P4 head coach to evaluate the relative successes of mid-major head coaching experience compared to P4 assistant coaches. Anecdotally, several coaches who were praised extensively throughout the 2024-25 season worked as mid-major head coaches first: Dawn Staley at Temple; Yolett McPhee-McCuin (Ole Miss) at Jacksonville University; Mark Campbell (TCU) at Sac State; Kim Caldwell (Tennessee) at Glenville State (D2) and Marshall University. This is far from definitive, but supports the premise that mid-major coaching experience prepares coaches for P4 conferences.

As I wrote previously:

“Many have adopted K. Anders Ericsson's 10,000-hour rule and applied it to skill development in sports. Many view coaching as a learned profession, and therefore a skill, as opposed to an innate talent, so it stands to reason the 10,000-hour rule would apply to the development of coaching expertise. The question is how best to accumulate the requisite deliberate practice to become an expert coach.”

I have been a head coach for nearly my entire coaching career. Consequently, I am biased toward head coaching experience. Being an assistant provides an opportunity to learn certain things, but being in charge of a program is a whole different level and job.

“In my experience, head coaches generally do the majority of the coaching during practices and games. They set the expectations, communicate with the players, offer feedback, instruct, devise game plans, make adjustments, oversee a staff, motivate players, teach and more.

Assistant coaches gain some experience running drills, implementing game plans, scouting, running offseason workouts, etc. — some head coaches do a better job of nurturing future head coaches than others — and they learn by watching their head coaches work. Therefore, there is value in being an assistant coach in terms of learning the art and science of coaching. However, just as one develops her shooting more through deliberate practice than watching expert shooters, a coach develops her coaching skills more through deliberate practice than watching an expert coach.”

Ultimately, there are many paths to becoming a great coach. Moving from P4 assistant to head coach is the safer, more lucrative path, as many P4 assistants make more money than low- or mid-major head coaches, and there will always be athletic directors who favor hires with P4 experience. UCLA’s Cori Close and Notre Dame’s Niele Ivey are two head coaches who moved directly from P4 assistant coach to P4 head coach and had great success this year.

While safer and more lucrative, this path also may be harder, as the coach learns on the job and every mistake or misstep is analyzed by many because of the stature of the programs. These coaches do not have the opportunity to master their crafts in relative anonymity; they encounter situations for the first time in front of millions of people. The pressure is much greater from their first day, whereas the pressure on an NCAA D2 head coach is comparably less, although it likely feels the same internally to a coach.

Prior to the NCAA men’s championship game, I re-listened to the Solving Basketball podcast episodes with Jonathan Safir and Todd Golden from University of Florida men’s basketball that were recorded when they coached at University of San Francisco. The discussions largely centered on fouling, and especially fouling with a lead and fouling to create a two-for-one at the end of the half in the single bonus. They experimented at USF in games nobody expected them to win (BYU) and nobody outside diehards paid attention to (USF vs Pacific).

Would they have experimented similarly if Golden had been a P4 assistant prior to a P4 head coach? Maybe, but the fallout would have been much greater if they experimented with something nonconventional and it failed.

Would Caldwell play her pressing, hockey-sub style if she was a P4 assistant and then a P4 head coach? Maybe, but unlikely, as most believed it would not work in the SEC regardless of her previous success, which included an NCAA D2 National Championship.

There is a reason most innovations start outside the top programs, as it is hard to innovate or go against conventional wisdom when there is pressure to win every game and every game is televised. Following convention is the safer route. The game is pushed forward by coaches like Caldwell and Miller or Nate Oates and Danny Hurley, former high school and low-major head coaches.

Starting a head coaching career at a lower competitive level enables coaches to explore and experiment more. Many of the best European coaches — Ettore Messina, Dimitrios Itoudis — started as youth coaches, and many others worked up from smaller clubs in lower levels or less competitive countries before reaching the EuroLeague or EuroCup level. Coaches make their mistakes with few people watching, not in front of the entire world. They accumulate practice. Develop their own identities. Perfect their playing and coaching styles. Learn and evolve. Coaching at lower levels is not an impediment to success or an indictment of their abilities as a coach as Barnes implied; instead, their previous head coaching experience prepares them for the performance pressure of P4 conferences because they got the reps and the deliberate practice before reaching the highest levels.