Build Your Staff Before You Build Your Roster

Summary: A stronger season often starts with building the coaching staff before finalizing the roster: define the roles you need, hire for teaching ability, communication, program fit, and longevity, and clarify expectations before tryouts. 

August is roster-building season. You're mapping depth charts, projecting lineups, maybe already running open gyms to see who put in the offseason work.

Staff usually comes second on that list, if it comes up at all. You'll figure out the bench once the roster's set.

One approach worth trying this year: decide who's coaching next to you before you decide who's playing for you. The roster questions — who plays where, who runs which drill line, who scouts Friday's opponent — get a lot easier to answer once your staff is actually in place. That's true whether this is your first season running a program or your fifteenth.

Why Staffing Jumped the List This Year

One industry signal worth paying attention to: CoachAD's 2026 Coaches Survey found that finding and keeping assistant coaches jumped from the tenth-ranked concern among athletic administrators to the first-ranked concern, in just one year. Roughly 80 percent of respondents said they're at least moderately concerned about it (CoachAD 2026 Coaches Survey). The survey doesn't publish full methodology or sample size, so treat that as one industry read, not a settled national fact.

Still, it tracks with what a lot of programs are running into: assistants burning out on stipend pay that doesn't match the hours, and a thinner pool of people willing to take on the job in the first place.

If your program hasn't had a real conversation about what you're offering an assistant — money and role clarity, and whether there's a path to something bigger down the road — this is the year to have it ready before you post the opening.

What "First Who, Then What" Means for a Coaching Staff

Researcher Jim Collins studied companies that made the jump from good to great: the leaders who built the strongest organizations got the right people in place first, then figured out where to point them (Jim Collins, "First Who, Then What"). Collins was writing about corporate leadership. This is a business analogy worth borrowing, applied here to a coaching staff.

Applied to a bench: you don't need your offense and rotations locked in to know what you need in a staff. You need someone who covers what you're not strong at, communicates the way your program needs, and is still around in year three. Settle that first, and the rest of your season's decisions get easier from there.

What a Staff-First Build Actually Looks Like

NFHS's guidance on hiring for education-based athletics lays out a process athletic directors use to fill coaching jobs, with Ryan Adams (CMAA) and Penny Lane of Washburn Rural High School both walking through it in the piece (NFHS, Steps Involved in Hiring Coaches). The five-item checklist below adapts that hiring sequence into questions you can walk through before your own roster locks in. It's a general translation built for that purpose — the original NFHS piece has the fuller AD-level process if you want the exact detail.

• Define the role before you look for a person. Do you need a JV coach who can help varsity practice, someone to own scouting, or someone who can run reps you can't be in two places for?
• Write down what the job actually requires — hours, responsibilities — before you talk to anyone about filling it.
• Build a short list from people already in your program's orbit first — former players and teachers in your building, maybe someone who's helped with your summer league — before posting the opening publicly.
• Interview like it matters, even for a stipend job. A short conversation about philosophy and expectations up front saves a season of friction later.
• Check references, even informal ones. A call to a coach who's worked alongside this person tells you more than a résumé line does.

Work through that list before tryouts — tryout week itself leaves no time to fix a bad fit.

What to Look For in an Assistant

Longtime Illinois coach Don Kloth spent 43 years on the bench and is an Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Famer. He's written about what actually makes an assistant valuable over the long haul, and his lens goes beyond basketball IQ (Don Kloth, 6 Keys to Maximizing Assistant Coaches). Don Kloth's original piece lists six specific keys. This piece's research packet summarized his framework in general terms, and the categories below are a plain-language translation built from that summary. His original piece has the full six-point list if you want the exact detail.

Turn it into questions you ask before you hire:

• Can this person break a skill down and teach it, step by step, so a player actually improves?
• Do they communicate with players and parents the way your program needs them to?
• Will they run your program's approach, or quietly run their own?
• Are they going to still be here in year three?

That last one matters more than it sounds. A staff that turns over every season never gets the chance to build shared shorthand with your players.

The Training Pipeline Is Growing, Even If Slowly

Part of the assistant shortage is a training-and-pipeline problem as much as a hiring one — most people stepping into an assistant role are learning on the job, the same way a lot of head coaches did.

There's real movement on that front worth knowing about. The Million Coaches Challenge announced in October 2025 that it had surpassed one million coaches trained nationally, according to the initiative's own materials (Million Coaches Challenge). Two state-level versions of that effort are worth pointing new assistants toward if you're in either state. Ohio's Coach Beyond program runs through Ohio State's LiFEsports initiative (Ohio State LiFEsports, Coach Beyond). A parallel Coach Beyond effort in Indiana runs through Ball State, offering free training for youth coaches there (Ball State, Coach Beyond–Indiana). Pointing a new hire toward one of these before the season starts costs you nothing and gives them a foundation you didn't have to build from scratch.

A Sequence to Start This Week

You don't have to solve your whole staffing picture by Friday. A few steps that work whether you're running a 3A program with three assistants or a small school where you're lucky to have one:

1. Write down what you actually need from your staff this year.
2. Have the real conversation with your current assistants before tryouts: are they in, and for how long?
3. If you're short a spot, build your short list from people already around your program before posting it publicly.
4. Interview for fit and communication as well as availability.
5. Once your staff is set, build the roster plan around what they can actually help you run.

If you've already got a staff you trust, take twenty minutes this week to write down what makes them work — the roles, the sequence, the expectations. Save it somewhere you can find it next season — a shared doc, a page in your binder, wherever you keep records you actually use.

Drop into the Hoop Leaders community and tell us what's worked for building your bench, or what's still an open question heading into tryouts.