Ask a room of high school coaches what the job is for and you'll get a version of "more than winning" within about ten seconds. It's the least controversial statement in coaching. It's also, mostly, a slogan — repeated sincerely and rarely translated into anything a coach does differently on a Tuesday.
It's worth asking what the evidence actually says. Some of it is more interesting than the slogan.
Coaches already agree. That's not the hard part.
In the largest survey of American sport coaches ever conducted — 10,485 respondents — only 6% ranked winning games among their top three coaching philosophies. Thirty-five percent named teaching life skills, and 35% named making sure all athletes have fun.
So the values question is settled, at least in what coaches say about themselves. The question worth spending time on is what separates coaches who act on those values from coaches who hold them and default to something else under pressure.
Coaches who ranked teaching life skills among their top philosophies reported higher career win percentages than those who didn't. They also reported greater impact on athletes' development — 77% versus 67% on measures of life and social skills.
Anderson-Butcher, D. & Bates, S. (2022). National Coach Survey, Ohio State University LiFEsports Initiative with the Aspen Institute's Project Play. Self-reported and correlational — but it's evidence against the assumption that developmental coaching costs you competitively.Hold that loosely. Coaches reporting their own win percentages is not a clean measurement, and causation could run either direction. But the widespread assumption — that focusing on development is what you do when you can't win — doesn't have data behind it, and this points the other way.
What athletes say they're there for
Researchers at George Washington University ran an unusually direct study: they asked young athletes, their coaches, and their parents to identify everything that makes sport fun, then rank it. The result was 81 distinct determinants across 11 dimensions.
The three top-rated dimensions were being a good sport, trying hard, and positive coaching. Winning ranked near the bottom of all 81. New uniforms and equipment finished dead last.
Every item at the top of that list is something a coach controls directly. None requires talent on your roster, a budget, or a favourable schedule.
Note the second one especially. "Trying hard" is not a soft value — athletes rank being pushed among the things that make sport worth playing. The popular framing that today's athletes want an easier experience isn't supported by asking them.
The gap between what coaches value and what they feel able to do
Here's where the national survey gets uncomfortable, and where it's most useful.
Coaches felt reasonably confident about the traditional parts of the job: 66% strongly agreed they could promote good sportsmanship, 65% that they could make athletes feel welcome, 63% that they could teach fundamental technique.
Then the other end of the list. Only 29% felt highly confident developing athletes into leaders. Only 20% felt confident reducing performance anxiety, 19% identifying off-the-field stressors, 18% linking athletes to mental health resources, and 17% helping athletes navigate social media pressure.
Those low-confidence items are, almost exactly, the "more than winning" part. Coaches believe in developing the whole athlete and report not knowing how. That's a training gap, not a character gap, and it's more tractable than the way this subject usually gets discussed.
The coaches themselves say so: 70% wanted training in relationship building, 70% in handling performance anxiety, 69% in leadership development, 67% in mental health, 66% in effective communication.
Four things that follow from the evidence
Treat culture as something with reps, not something announced
Most programs have values on a wall. Fewer have a moment in the week where those values are practised and reviewed.
If "being a good sport" is one of the three things your athletes rank highest, it should show up as a named, coached behaviour — how you respond to a bad call, how you treat an opponent who's struggling, what happens on your bench when the game gets away from you. Coach it the way you'd coach footwork, including the correction when it's done poorly.
Make effort legible
Athletes rank trying hard among the top sources of enjoyment, which means the recognition system in your program is doing more work than you might think. If the only things publicly acknowledged are outcomes, you are systematically under-rewarding the thing they say they value.
Naming specific effort — the recovery run, the second block attempt, the unglamorous rep in the ninetieth minute of practice — is not participation-trophy behaviour. It's reinforcing the input you actually want more of.
Know where your role ends, precisely
This is the one item on the list with real downside risk.
Athletes are reporting substantial distress — 47% of Gen Z ages 12 to 26 say they often or always feel anxious, and the NCAA's survey of 23,000+ student-athletes found anxiety and mental exhaustion running as much as double pre-pandemic rates. An athlete who trusts you will eventually tell you something serious.
What good looks like is narrow: notice the change, say so without diagnosing it, and hand it to someone trained. The 18% confidence figure on linking athletes to mental health resources is fixable in an afternoon — find out who your school counsellor is, what the referral process is, and what you're obligated to report. Do it before you need it.
Get feedback, because nobody is going to offer it
Nearly half of coaches surveyed had never been evaluated. Among those who had, only about half said it made them better. Fewer than half reported a supervisor giving them constructive, frequent feedback.
That's an isolation problem, and it's the most likely reason a coach plateaus. Manufacture the feedback loop yourself: ask athletes what's working at midseason and act visibly on one thing, ask an assistant to watch your interactions rather than your tactics, film a practice and watch yourself instead of the drill. All three are uncomfortable. All three tell you something nobody will volunteer.
Why any of this matters at scale
High school sports participation reached a record 8,266,244 athletes in 2024–25, up more than 645,000 over three years. The pipeline feeding it, though, loses most kids well before ninth grade — the average American child quits organized sport around age 11, most often because it stopped being fun.
Coaching turnover runs near 20% annually in the longest-running dataset available, an analysis of Georgia high school football. Roughly one in five programs is being rebuilt at any given time.
Put those together and the case for taking this seriously isn't sentimental. The determinants of whether kids keep playing are overwhelmingly things a coach controls, they cost nothing, they don't appear to trade off against winning, and most coaches already believe in them and say they don't know how to execute them. That last part is the most encouraging fact in this entire body of research, because a knowledge gap is the easiest kind to close.