How College Coaches and Their Spouses Can Build Careers That Work Together

When a college coach gets another job, life tends to speed up. You’re already beholden to the academic calendar, so the artificial nature of start and end dates puts pressure on you to move quickly, to figure out your contract, your benefits, where you’re going to live, what you’re going to do with your current house, where your kids are going to school, moving expenses, everything all at once. Most people get weeks or months to figure this stuff out, and your timeline gets much more compressed due to the nature of the profession. After all, you need to be on campus ASAP!

And, oh, crap! You’re married, aren’t you? So, uh, your spouse has a whole career and life. Wow. Who’d have thought?

You think I’m being facetious here, I’m sure. After all, who forgets to take into consideration what’s going on with their spouse when it comes to big life changes like this? The answer is, umm, lots of coaches. Anecdotally, we all know coaches that have gone through divorces because the constantly shifting nature of the profession put too much strain on their families, and their spouse just got sick of it and left after like the 5th move in 12 years.

Can you blame them? You know other people are allowed to have careers too, right? They’re allowed to like their job, like the people they work with, like the aspects of their life around town. The support network they’ve built in the area. The routines they’ve established. They’ve built up seniority in their career, real credibility. They have their own career trajectory.

And then you take a lateral move at State University with a minor pay cut and a three-state jump because it’s a “better conference.”

Maaaaaan.

Look, I’m just going to be frank. I always try to write these articles from a gender-neutral perspective but this is a male dominated industry. Drawing from 2024-2025 Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) data, men make up 72.2% of all college coaching positions in the U.S., and women only make up 27.8%. And as much as I try to draw from real research and statistics to make conclusions about stuff, I’m just going to come out and say that this is a patriarchal artifact of male-led households, where the man is the real breadwinner of the family and his career matters most, and his wife just needs to get on board. Can women do this to men? Sure. Can this dynamic occur in same-sex partnerships? Absolutely. But from a statistical standpoint, most of this is occurring in hetero male-female marriages where the man is the coach.

The irony of the above paragraph is that I’ve potentially offended the very people who need to read this article the most haha. Because in this article we’re going to talk about what it takes to build a pair of careers, where at least one partner coaches, in a way that supports each other, grow together, and allow for flexibility and adaptability without undue sacrifice or scorekeeping.

One Move Usually Isn’t the Issue

Let’s say you’re an assistant coach at a smaller school and get offered a job at a bigger program. Better resources, better title, probably a little more money, and in the context of your career it makes pretty obvious sense. Your spouse has a decent job where you are now, but they’re still relatively early in their career too and changing employers isn’t some catastrophic professional event. You talk about it, they’re on board, everybody packs up their shit and you move.

A few years later, another opportunity comes up. This one is bigger. You’re moving into a coordinator role, getting your first head coaching job, jumping up a level, something like that. Your spouse has been at their new employer for a few years at this point and things are going well. They know people. They’ve built some credibility. They may have gotten promoted, or at least gotten far enough into the job where the next step is starting to come into view.

But, again, this is a good opportunity. So you move.

Then two years later the head coach gets fired, everybody scatters, you find another job and now your spouse gets to do it all over again. This is where the whole thing gets kind of slippery, because if you handed me each of those decisions separately there’s a decent chance I’d agree with all of them. Of course you took the bigger job. Of course you took the head coaching opportunity. Of course you needed another job when the staff got fired. What the hell else were you supposed to do?

Now zoom out 15 years.

You went from assistant coach to coordinator to head coach. You made more money, built a bigger network, got more experience, put better stuff on your résumé, and generally did all the things we’d describe as building a successful career. Your spouse may have worked for four employers in four states and spent a pretty good chunk of those same 15 years rebuilding stuff they already built somewhere else.

Seniority gets reset. Relationships get reset. Maybe there was a promotion coming and then you moved. Maybe there were employer retirement contributions that never vested. Maybe they were finally working for somebody they liked and now they get to roll the dice on a new boss again. And somewhere in there, your coaching schedule probably got more demanding too, which has a funny way of creating more work at home for the person who isn’t coaching.

Again, none of these decisions necessarily sucked. That’s what makes this worth talking about. You can make a bunch of decisions that were reasonable at the time and still end up with a pattern that kind of sucks in aggregate.

One career kept building. The other one kept rebuilding.

That’s a pretty big difference.

Okay, So What Are You Actually Trying to Build?

This is where I unfortunately have to drift into some “what’s important to you?” stuff, which sounds woo-woo as hell until you realize it’s kind of impossible to make good career decisions without knowing what you’re trying to accomplish with your life in the first place.

Personally, if I had to rank the three biggest things in my own life, I’d probably go family first, running second, career third. My career still matters a lot to me. I spend a stupid amount of time thinking about it, working on it, building things, trying to get better, whatever. But I also know that if my career went absolutely gangbusters and I barely saw my family and stopped running, I’d probably be less happy with my life even though my career satisfaction went up.

That’s why I don’t really buy the idea that career satisfaction and life satisfaction live in separate buckets. Your career affects where you live, how much money you make, what your schedule looks like, how much energy you have when you’re not working, what your spouse has to absorb, and a million other things. You can be doing incredibly well professionally while gradually building a life you don’t actually like very much.

Your priorities may look completely different from mine, and they probably should. There are people who want to hammer the career side of things for 10 years and are perfectly happy making sacrifices elsewhere to do it. There are people who would rather live near their parents than make another $50,000. There are people who worked for a decade to reach one very specific professional opportunity and, when it finally arrives, everybody else in the household is perfectly happy getting behind it.

And this stuff moves over time anyway. What you care about at 28 may not have much resemblance to what you care about at 38. Kids come along. Parents get older. One person starts making a ton more money. Somebody realizes they don’t actually like the career they’ve been chasing. You get tired of moving. You get tired of not moving. Life changes.

You don’t need to create some permanent list of family values and hang it above the fireplace. But you probably need enough awareness to know what you’re trading away when you say something is a “better opportunity,” because sometimes it’s only better through the very narrow lens of one person’s career.

Coaching Gets to Be Part of the Tradeoff Too

I think coaches get so used to the unstable nature of the profession that eventually the coaching career starts to feel like weather. It’s just a thing that happens and everybody else figures out how to respond to it. A job opens, you take it, your spouse changes jobs, your kids change schools, you sell the house, you find a new dentist, everybody keeps moving.

Sometimes, yes, that’s what makes sense. There are coaching opportunities that absolutely justify moving a family. I don’t want to make this sound like every move is some selfish act by the coach because that would be ridiculous.

I left coaching largely because of my spouse’s career. There were other things wrapped into that decision, but when we got to the point where we were figuring out what made the most sense for us, continuing to chase coaching jobs just wasn’t the best answer anymore. I cared about coaching. I had spent years doing it. I moved halfway across the country for it. It wasn’t like I woke up one day and suddenly didn’t give care about coaching.

Her opportunity made more sense for us.

That was pretty much it.

For most coaches, this isn’t going to end with leaving coaching altogether. It may just mean turning down one job, staying somewhere for another year, taking the job that looks a little worse on paper because the rest of the setup is better, or letting your spouse’s opportunity drive the family decision for once.

Frankly, I think getting comfortable with this probably makes you better at evaluating coaching opportunities too. If every step “up” feels mandatory, you can convince yourself almost anything is worth doing. Bigger school? Better conference? More money? Hell yeah, let’s move.

Once you’re actually willing to stay put, the next job has to be good enough to justify what it’s asking from everybody.

I don’t hate that standard.

How Much Are We Actually Talking About?

One of my recurring complaints about financial rules of thumb is that they tend to flatten things that aren’t actually all that comparable, and this is another place where that happens. We talk about more money, better title, worse commute, spouse has to change jobs, moving away from family, like they’re all little chips we can place on one side of a scale.

The size of the thing matters.

Could still be a great move! Your new job could put you in position to make a ton more money later. The new city could be somewhere you both want to live. Your spouse may already hate their job and be thrilled to leave. Fine. But let’s not pretend like this is some financial windfall you’re walking into.

But now make the new coaching salary $500,000.

Well, huh. That changes things.

An extra $400,000 can paper over a lot of other problems. You can pay for childcare. You can hire help around the house. Your spouse can take six months finding the right job instead of panic-applying to everything on Indeed the week you move. They can go back to school, start a business, work less, stop working for a while, whatever fits the life you’re building. You can save enough over a few years that the financial trajectory of the household changes completely.

Money won’t compensate for literally everything, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend the number doesn’t eventually get large enough that it overwhelms some of the other concerns.

The same thing works in reverse. Leaving a job you started six months ago isn’t the same as leaving a career you’ve been building at the same organization for 12 years. Losing $10,000 of income isn’t the same as losing $100,000. Moving two hours away from family isn’t the same as moving across the country from the grandparents who currently watch your kids two days a week.

And then some of this is entirely personal. Some people love new cities and new jobs. They meet people easily. They like novelty. They’d probably get bored staying somewhere for 10 years anyway. Other people take forever to settle in, and by the time they finally know their coworkers, have friends, have a routine, know where the good grocery store is and stop using Google Maps to get everywhere, it’s apparently time to move again.

You can’t put that into the same spreadsheet as salary and benefits. It still counts.

Agency Matters a Lot Here

Take something like one spouse staying home with the kids.

If both people want that, cool. One spouse genuinely wants to stay home, the coach wants the same thing, they’ve planned for it financially and everybody is pretty happy with the arrangement.

Now take the same situation except the coach really wants their spouse to stay home because childcare is a pain in the ass and the coaching schedule makes everything easier if somebody else just handles the home front.

Looks pretty similar from the outside.

Probably doesn’t feel similar.

Your spouse may genuinely not care that much about climbing the career ladder. Great. They may prefer a flexible job that gives them more time at home. Great. They may love moving every few years. Also great. There’s nothing inherently wrong with one person making more money, one person working fewer hours, or one person carrying more of the household responsibilities during a particular stretch.

It gets different when none of this really feels chosen anymore.

Coaching schedules can be effing ridiculous. Travel, recruiting, practices, games, camps, meetings, weekends, whatever. Somebody usually has to absorb the fact that the coach simply isn’t available as much as a person with a normal job might be, and in a lot of households that’s going to be the spouse.

That can work perfectly well.

But “we talked about this and this is how we want to divide things” is a different sentence from “your job is less demanding, so obviously this is your responsibility.”

You can probably coast on that distinction for a while. Over 10 or 15 years it starts to matter quite a bit.

Unequal Is Fine. Keeping Score Is Weird.

I don’t think two careers need to get equal attention all the time, because I’m not really sure how that would even work in practice. There are going to be stretches where one person has the better opportunity and it makes sense for the household to lean into it.

A first head coaching job might be one of those stretches. So could a huge jump in pay, a degree program, a promotion for your spouse, starting a business, or any number of things where the upside for one person is large enough that everybody agrees to make some accommodations for a while.

That’s life.

Where this gets stupid is if you start treating every sacrifice like a credit that sits on a marital balance sheet. “I moved for you last time, so now it’s my turn.” Maybe! Or maybe your opportunity now sucks and theirs last time was amazing. These decisions aren’t suddenly good because the scoreboard says somebody is due.

History is still useful, though, because patterns matter. If the last three big decisions all favored the coaching career, I’d probably want to know why. There may be a completely good reason. Your spouse may have been happy with every one of those moves. Their career may have transferred easily and they may genuinely enjoy the whole thing.

Or they may be getting pretty tired of watching their career exist in whatever space yours leaves behind.

You need to know which one it is.

Temporary imbalance doesn’t bother me much. Life has seasons, and sometimes one person is going to carry more. What gets dangerous is when something that was supposed to be temporary quietly becomes the permanent structure of the household and nobody talks about it anymore.

That’s where resentment starts to build, and I don’t think it usually happens because of one giant sacrifice. It’s more like five years of little stuff piling up while everybody keeps saying, “This is just how coaching works.”

Portability Is Useful, Until It Starts Running Everything

There’s obvious value in having a career you can take anywhere when you’re married to a coach. I’m certainly not going to argue otherwise.

I’d just be careful about building an entire professional life around being easy to move.

Say your spouse gets offered a leadership role. It pays more, they’re excited about it, and it opens doors they’ve been trying to get through for years. The only real downside is that it ties them more closely to their current company and location.

Should they turn it down because you might get another coaching job in three years?

I don’t know.

There are situations where that could make sense. There are also situations where that’s a pretty sucky reason to kneecap somebody’s career when you don’t even have another offer on the table yet.

I think the better thing to build is flexibility, and that’s going to look different depending on the profession. Nurses may be employable all over the place but still have licensing, specialization, seniority, schedule, or retirement considerations. Teachers can move and still run into certification and pension issues. Attorneys have licensing and sometimes a local book of business. Professors can have jobs that are ridiculously difficult to recreate somewhere else.

Remote work sounds like a magic answer until the employer changes its policy or the promotion somebody wants requires them to show up in an office. A business owner may be able to run the thing from anywhere, or the entire business may depend on relationships in one city.

There isn’t really a clean category called “portable careers.” Almost every career has friction somewhere. You just want to know where yours is.

What parts travel well? What parts don’t? What relationships matter? What would be difficult to rebuild? Are there things your spouse can do that create more options later without holding back their career today?

And, by the way, coaches should be doing this too. Build relationships around the profession. Develop a reputation that isn’t completely tied to one head coach. Build skills that travel. Keep your own options open.

Your spouse shouldn’t be the only one expected to build their career around the fact that yours is unstable.

Some of the Cost Is Hard to See

The easy stuff goes into the spreadsheet. Salary difference, benefits, moving costs, housing costs, whatever.

Then there’s all the other crap.

You move away from family and suddenly the free childcare you never thought of as a financial benefit is gone. You lose friends who can pick up the kids when something goes sideways. You leave doctors you like. Your spouse leaves coworkers they actually enjoy. They lose a network that made their job easier. Everybody loses routines that took years to build.

Then somebody has to rebuild all of it.

Again.

For one person, that may be a minor inconvenience. For another person it’s exhausting, and I think this is where the mental cost of repeated moves gets overlooked. Two people can experience the exact same move completely differently.

One person thinks, sweet, new city.

The other one is thinking, I literally just got comfortable here.

And none of that necessarily shows up when you’re comparing compensation packages. You still have to account for it somehow, even if “my spouse is really freakin' tired of starting over” doesn’t fit neatly into a financial projection.

Planning Can Make These Decisions Less Rigid

This is where the actual planning starts to help, because so far I’ve mostly spent several thousand words pointing out all the ways this can go sideways.

Money gives you room.

If you have enough cash sitting around, your spouse doesn’t necessarily need to take the first job available after a move. You can absorb a few months on one income. You can carry two housing payments temporarily. You can pay for more childcare, another certification, school, or whatever else creates some breathing room while everybody figures out what comes next.

You may never do any of that.

The ability to do it matters.

Fixed expenses work in the opposite direction. If basically every dollar of both paychecks is already committed, both careers become more rigid because neither one can take much of a hit. It’s difficult to tell your spouse to spend six months finding the right job when you need their paycheck next month to cover the mortgage.

Benefits can also sneak into this. Your spouse may be six months away from vesting in something. Their health insurance may be considerably better. They may be in a pension system where another move creates consequences that aren’t obvious if all you’re looking at is salary. Childcare can completely change the economics of a move, especially if you’re leaving family support behind.

Then there’s the planning that isn’t really financial at all. It helps if both of you have some sense of which opportunities are actually worth moving for. It helps if your spouse keeps relationships alive in their field even when they’re happy where they are. It helps if you’ve already talked about stuff like whether you’d ever live apart temporarily instead of discovering one person considers that completely unacceptable while the other thought it was an obvious option.

For one couple, six months apart might sound miserable and not even be worth discussing. For another, it could preserve a really good career while the coaching situation settles down.

I don’t care which answer you come to.

That’s kind of the point of all of this planning. You’re trying to make the next decision a little less binary. A little less “take the coaching job and blow everything else up” versus “turn down the coaching job and always wonder if you screwed up.”

More options are useful.

When Something Changes, Look at the Whole Thing Again

Eventually, something will change. A new job, firing, promotion, kids, parents, childcare, whatever. That’s when I’d want to pull all of this back into the conversation and look at the whole mess again.

What gets better? What gets worse? How much better or worse are we actually talking about? Is the downside temporary, or are you giving something up that’s going to take years to rebuild? Are there things one person just flat-out isn’t willing to do?

Then I’d look backward a little, but not because somebody is owed a turn. I’d want to know whether the same pattern keeps showing up. Have the last few decisions all favored the coaching career? Is everybody genuinely okay with that? Is there some reason it keeps happening, or have you just gotten used to assuming the family will adjust?

Then look forward.

I think that’s one of the more useful questions here because it forces you out of the immediate decision. A move that looks perfectly reasonable by itself may look a little different if it’s the fourth one in a pattern you don’t actually want to continue.

And before you settle into yes or no, figure out whether there’s anything in the middle. Timing may be negotiable. Money can buy time. Your spouse could stay behind for a while. The whole family could stay behind. You could pay for more help. You could simply wait for a better job instead of treating this one like the last opportunity you’ll ever see.

Some of those options will be terrible for you.

Fine.

Cross them off.

Talk About This Before Everything Is on Fire

The worst time to figure all of this out is after you get an offer and the new school wants an answer by Friday.

At that point everything gets compressed. People get emotional. The opportunity feels scarce. Everybody starts trying to solve logistics before they’ve really agreed on whether they even want the same thing.

You should probably know before that moment whether your spouse likes their job. Whether they’re getting burned out. Whether they’re thinking about going back to school. Whether another move sounds exciting or makes them want to scream. Whether one person feels like they’ve been carrying more of the household load than they signed up for.

It doesn’t need to be some quarterly marriage board meeting with an agenda and minutes. Just talk about it enough that nobody gets blindsided.

This is also one of the areas where I think a financial advisor can be useful in a way that has very little to do with investments. A good advisor can help facilitate this conversation, put numbers around the things that actually have numbers, remember what both people said mattered the last time this came up, and point out options that might be financially possible even if they don’t feel possible at first.

Sometimes it helps to have another person in the room who isn’t trying to win.

I’m not going to tell a couple whose career deserves priority. That’s not my call. But if one person is completely dominating the conversation and the other one is basically being informed what the family is going to do, I’m probably going to have something to say about that.

Most of the time, though, it’s less dramatic. It’s just slowing things down, making sure everybody gets heard, and helping two people understand what a decision actually means before they make it.

Conclusion

College coaching is going to create weird situations for your family. You’ll probably move more than the average person. Somebody may get fired at a terrible time. You could get offered a job that completely changes the financial picture. Your spouse could finally get the opportunity they’ve been waiting for at exactly the same time.

There isn’t some perfectly fair way to sequence all of this where both careers move up and to the right at exactly the same speed. Some years your career is going to get more attention. Some years theirs probably should. There will be times one person carries more of the load, times where the money is legitimately too good to ignore, and times where a coaching opportunity just isn’t good enough to justify what everybody else would have to give up for it.

What matters more to me is what all of those decisions start adding up to.

If both people still feel like they had a hand in building the life they’re living, both people are reasonably satisfied with where their careers are going, and you’ve built enough flexibility into the household that the next change doesn’t immediately send everybody into panic mode, I’d call that pretty successful.

The two careers probably aren’t going to move in lockstep.

They don’t have to.

Just make sure one of them doesn't slowly disappear underneath the other one, while everybody is busy making decisions that made perfect sense at the time.