I have coached HS Football, Wrestling, Track, for many years and one year of VB. In Jr High I coached those sports and some BBall. I have also coached legion baseball and some girls softball.
I think it is easier to coach a sport if you really like the sport.
Football is and always has been my first love as a sport. Since leaving the teaching profession it is really the only think I miss about teaching. Football requires a lot of prepwork. Scouting and putting together a game plan and then putting your practice schedual together is time consuming. You have to be terribly orginized to coach football even before you get to the practice field. I had to do a lot less prep work because I was a lowly freshman assistant coach on the staff. I wasn't required to break down film for varsity games or spend my Sundays game planning for the next week. I have done it before and was happy not to be doing it.
I coached wrestling for 16 of the 21 years I taught school. It is a great sport that allows any kid of any size to complete against other athletes that are his same size. It truely is a sport that the harder you work at it the better you will get. Being athletic is always a plus, but even a marginal athlete can see the fruits of hard work. Wrestling is my least favorite sport to coach. For me, wrestling practice is terribly boring and a grind. Wrestling practice is not really a lot of fun. It is work and it is sweating and tiring and so much about conditioning and repitition. HS wrestling coaches spend every Saturday from Dec 1 to the end of February in a gym. They generally get up and are on a school bus at about 6 AM to get to a wresling tournament and if they are lucky they may walk out of that gym and get home by about 6 that night. My wife absolutely hated this about wrestling and I didn't care much for it either. Most wrestling coaches love it and live for those days in a gym at a tournament, I dreaded it.
Track is a very easy sport to coach. I always enjoyed it, getting outside after being cooped up inside all winter. Not real tough I generally coached hurdles, and relays. A lot of kids don't understand the sport though and don't like it. I always told them the first day of practice that in track we run and we will do it every day so if you don't like to run than this is the wrong sport for you.
Played a lot of Baseball and coached it a little. Baseball to me is a sport that a lot of coaches make to difficult. When i played baseball in HS practice consisted of BP and taking some infield and never lasted more than about an hour and a half. Onec the season started we rarely had practice because we usually played at least 4 games a week. We were always good, I never finished lower than 2nd in a 10 team conference. To me too many coaches try and change what there players are dong to much and make them think to much. My son played legion ball last year and they used to have practice every day for 2.5 hours and never got any better and were about a .500 team. I bit my lip and said nothing. The one thing they never did at practice was take infield, but they worked on situational base running all the time.
teach, you are right though, Golf is a stupid easy sport to coach at the HS level.
