I spent 29 years in education, 16 of them as the athletic director at Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (Go Cougars!) I've been through the state AD association leadership chairs. And if there's one thing I heard over and over again from other ADs it's this: the first few years in the chair almost broke them.
That's not an exaggeration. Depending on where you are, you're probably losing somewhere between 30 and 37 percent of your ADs every single year. That means most schools are replacing their athletic director about once every three years.
So when we put together a webinar with a handful of former ADs — now working alongside athletic directors every day here at Bound — we didn't want to sugarcoat the early years. We wanted to talk honestly about what those first few years are actually like, because almost nobody tells you the truth about it going in.
Our ADs shared what no one told them the first day in the chair.
Jodi Loeblein-Lecker was tapped to be the AD on literally the first day fall sports competition began. No system, no schedule software — just paper and a phone. She had to call the opposing soccer team and listen to their hotline recording (this was 2006, when schools still updated voicemail with their schedules) just to confirm who was showing up.
That night, after a big football game — one that was actually being broadcast on Fox Sports North — she ended up holding a $16,000 gate with nowhere secure to put it. Nobody had told her where the safe was.
She and the police officer escorting her back to the building improvised: they hid the cash inside a paper shredder overnight until she could get to the bank the next morning. Weeks later, she found out there was, in fact, a much bigger safe in the building the whole time.
"Nothing really prepares you for that first week — or even the first few years — of being an AD."
Kolleen Nesheim had a similar welcome. She was handed a three-ring binder on a Tuesday and told, "Here you go, good luck." Four days later she was presenting a brand-new code of conduct to 400 parents in a packed gym — a policy the school board had just approved, that she'd had zero hand in writing.
As Kolleen put it: "Nothing really prepares you for that first week — or even the first few years — of being an AD."
Brian Petersen had a different kind of surprise waiting for him. He came in at 28 years old, with a mentor, good lead time, and what he thought were solid systems already in place.
What he wasn't prepared for was managing the coaches.
"I am not prepared for managing adults," he told our group. "That was the one thing I felt like I was not trained or coached up on." Different personalities, different expectations, all of it landing on his desk on top of emails, parent concerns, and eligibility questions.
"We got into this to build programs, to develop kids, to lead a culture we believe in — not just to survive the chaos of a Tuesday."
And here's the part that stuck with me most from what Brian said: a lot of the coaches you're now responsible for leading are your good friends. These are the people you spend Friday nights with. And now, sometimes, you have to have hard conversations with them.
Brian's advice: have those conversations anyway. "If they're truly your good friend, they know you have the best interest of your school, your programs, and your students at heart."
If being an athletic director was only about these moments — the chaos, the paper-shredder safes, the crash course in managing adult personalities — it would explain everything. It would explain why one out of every three ADs looks at this job after a year or two and says, "No thank you, I'll go back to coaching."
Because that's not what most of us signed up for.
We got into this to build programs, to develop kids, to lead a culture we believe in — not just to survive the chaos of a Tuesday.
But here's the good news, and it's the whole reason we wanted to do this series: it doesn't stay that way. Not for the ADs who make it through. Something changes — usually somewhere around year three, four, or five — where you stop just managing the fires and start actually leading.
That's exactly what we get into in Part 2: the turning point, and what our panel did differently to get there.