Go to Back to School in Maryland

Go to Back to School in Virginia

Go to the Back-to-School Index

Go to Washington World

Go to Home Page

Game's Over, High School Coaches Say

It had become an annual event every Aug. 15 for Tom Glynn. As on any other morning, he would wake up, take a shower and prepare to leave his house. But on that date each summer, he would go off to the first day of his "part-time job" as football coach at Douglass High School in Upper Marlboro. That day was always different.

"My wife would kiss me goodbye," says Glynn, who built one of the top programs in Prince George's County but resigned as coach this summer. "I would say, `See you later,' and she said, `See you in December.' "

Coaching high school football once was a five-month part-time job, from the first day of August preseason practice to the end of the state playoffs in late November. But in recent years, it has become almost year-round for the coaches who want to produce competitive teams.

Most public school football coaches in the Washington area are full-time teachers, but they admit that the sport they love dominates their lives. The last two years, however, have brought the greatest exodus of established coaches in any period in the area's history.

Throughout the winter, coaches must push athletes into the school weight room. They must organize teams to play in summer leagues to develop skills. And minimum grade-point average standards, adopted by most jurisdictions over the last decade, require coaches to monitor the schoolwork of their players throughout the year or risk having them declared ineligible.

Although the demands of coaching have increased, the monetary stipends paid to coaches have remained stagnant. Montgomery County pays all football coaches, regardless of experience, $4,616 annually to coach -- the highest of any suburban Maryland jurisdiction. Anne Arundel pays its least experienced coaches $2,206 for a season. Charles County pays all coaches $2,120. No other jurisdiction pays more than $4,000 annually.

Glynn, 39, said that last school year, he worked two nights a week after practice and all day Sunday loading trucks for a company in Alexandria to help his family financially.

Tom Glynn, who worked long hours as football coach at Douglass High School in Upper Marlboro, now is an assistant coach at Lee High School in Franconia. By Mark Finkenstaedt for The Washington Post

Among veteran coaches who have resigned in the last two years are Fred Shepherd of Churchill High, in Potomac (won state championships in 1976 and 1977), Ernie Ceccato of Quince Orchard, in Gaithersburg (won state title in 1991), Larry Layman of Crossland, in Temple Hills, Steve Hoopengardner of Great Mills, in St. Mary's County, and Marv Garlick of Kennedy, in Silver Spring. And last month, one of the most successful coaches in Virginia history, Danny Meier, announced that he would not return after leading Chantilly to the Virginia AAA Division 6 title. Meier is 43.

The chances of many more coaches marking a 20th or 30th season in the profession -- something once quite common among Washington area coaches -- continues to dwindle.

"I think about [quitting] all the time, because the demands get greater and greater and greater," said Seneca Valley Coach Terry Changuris, a 22-year coach who has guided his Germantown team to three state championships as a head coach.

In most high school sports, practice and games take up much of the time required of a coach. Football is different. Glynn estimated that he spent at least 40 hours each week on football in addition to practices and games. He said he rarely arrived home before 9 p.m. most weekdays.

Football is a rare high school sport. Watching hours of videotape is considered a necessity, not an option. A team may change its entire offensive and defensive schemes each week, depending upon the opponent.

And one of the rewards for a successful coach can be time-consuming. If a school develops a player considered talented enough to play in college, the coach helps put together videotape highlight reels to send to college recruiters.

"There is no [other] sport which requires" as much time, said Meier, who left coaching because the time demands would not allow him to pursue his career goal of becoming a high school principal. "For every hour on the field, coaches are putting in three or four hours in preparation, working with equipment or watching film."

Meier's teams won two Virginia state championships at West Potomac, in the Alexandria area of Fairfax County, before he moved to Chantilly. He said would leave home before 5 a.m. most school days in order to get home by 8 p.m. so he could see his four children.

Meier, who also was a guidance counselor at Chantilly, was willing to deal with the long hours. However, the previous six years, he passed up teaching-administrative promotions because they would have spelled the end of his coaching career. This summer, Meier finally decided to become director of guidance at Herndon High, which he hopes will start him on an administrative path.

"When I started coaching, I was a single guy," Meier said. "I was in it for the love of the game. It gets tougher when you have a family and you are the breadwinner. There is more pressure on you [financially]. I started feeling, `Am I asking my family to sacrifice too much?' "

Football had become such a big part of the Meier family's life that when his sons recently watched a highlight video of last season's championship team, Meier said his wife, Annie, cried. Even though football had taken away so much time from their family time together, Annie Meier realized that she too was going to have a difficult time adjusting to life without the game, he said.

Garlick also left coaching because of new demands of him in teaching. He has been a coach in Montgomery County for 25 years, the last 10 as head coach at Kennedy. This year, among his five classes, he was assigned three different courses, including one he had never previously taught. In previous years, he taught only two different courses.

At Seneca Valley High School in Germantown, Coach Terry Changuris tells Mike Lewis, Michael Ricucci and Kevin Sheridan, from left, where to find equipment. By Reginald A Perman Jr. for The Washington Post

"When am I supposed to have time for three preparations and still have time to prepare a football team?" he said.

Layman spent 33 years in coaching before he left the Crossland job after the 1995 season. For most of those years, he overlooked how much of his life was taken up by football.

"The time demands did increase over the years substantially," he said. "You do it all those years and you do not realize it. You just do it."

Regardless of the amount of their respective stipends, suburban Maryland coaches say their pay is negligible compared with the number of hours the job requires.

"All good coaches will put in time that far exceeds what the stated compensatory time is," said Ed Masood, the director of athletics for Montgomery County.

Glynn said most coaches put in more time than the job description requires because they are dedicated to the game. He said increased pressure from parents and the community to produce winning teams demands that dedication.

"If their child was having difficulty in math, would they expect their teacher to stay after and help them?" said Glynn, who taught algebra, trigonometry and pre-calculus at Douglass. "Of course you would answer, `Yes.' . . . Why would you not expect the same thing from the football coach for a football player?"

Don Disney, director of athletics for Howard County, said football coaches are driven as much by personal pride.

"They are competitive in nature -- they are ex-athletes," he said. "They are not going to lose their jobs here if they go 0-10, but they do not enjoy it if they go out and lose."

However, Hoopengardner, who after 17 seasons will not return this fall as Great Mills coach, said the desire to have a winning team can create pressure from within the school, with administrators trying to exert too much influence.

"We have a lot of people trying to be [like Dallas Cowboys owner] Jerry Jones, trying to run a football team from an ownership standpoint," Hoopengardner said. "If you hire a coach, you are hiring them to run the program. You need to have confidence in them."

But Masood said some coaches make the job more complicated than it should be, burning themselves out.

"It is not just putting in time; it is using time effectively and correctly. . . . Using time efficiently and correctly makes you a winning program," Masood said. But "nobody twisted their arm to be a football coach. They chose to do it, and they are very well compensated for it. And if they do not think the compensation is good, they should go to Baltimore City or some other jurisdiction" where coaching stipends are lower.

Changuris worries about the departure of longtime coaches.

"I think it is going to hurt the level of play," he said. "If you keep losing veteran coaches and cannot replace them with solid young talent, the quality of coaching is going to go down. And who are the new coaches going to learn from?"