The Complexity of Hiring for Athletics & Recreation Leadership Roles: What Job Postings Leave Unsaid

Before I begin I just want to highlight that I am not privy to the internal priorities of this hiring committee. I do not know what conversations are happening behind closed doors at the University of Guelph. And especially, this piece is not about Guelph specifically. It is about a pattern I have observed — repeatedly, across Ontario post-secondary institutions — in how Athletics and Recreation departments structure, post, and fill leadership roles at the intersection of student-athlete experience and high-performance sport. I am writing this because I care about the people who end up in these roles and the student athletes they support. If any post-secondary institution A&R department leadership reads this and finds something useful, then my objective has been achieved. I enjoy musing over complex topics and sharing what I’ve learned working alongside student-athletes across multiple Ontario universities, from York to McMaster and beyond.

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A job posting crossed my feed recently: Director, Student Athlete Experience and High-Performance Sport at the University of Guelph. It made me stop scrolling.

Not because it surprised me — but because, as I read the job description, it crystallized something I have been turning over for a long time. The role sits at the intersection of two areas of Athletics and Recreation that have, historically, been kept very separate: high-performance sport acumen and the holistic support of a diverse student-athlete population. And here they are, bundled together, under one title, for one person to skillfully take on.

I found myself genuinely curious. Not skeptical — curious. Because whoever steps into this role will be navigating one of the most complex tensions in post-secondary sport. And I think that tension deserves more airtime than it typically gets before the hire is made.

So consider this an open letter to all A&R departments — at Guelph and everywhere else — who are wrestling with how to structure this kind of leadership. I am not here to critique the process that went into drafting this job posting, because especially at post secondary institutions, there is A LOT of due process that goes into the time between role conceptualization and HR actually posting the job. I am here to explore what job postings in this space so often leave unsaid.

The Priority Tug of War

Job postings tell you a lot about what an organization values — sometimes more than they intend to.

The University of Guelph’s posting is thoughtful. The language is inclusive, the commitment to equity is named explicitly, and the breadth of the role reflects genuine ambition for what student-athlete experience could look like at a major institution. The posting itself is refreshing, a welcome frame shift in the space of student-athlete institutional support.

But language and architecture can pull in different directions. And when a posting bundles high-performance sport credentials alongside student experience competencies — and then, if in the selection process, the scales tip toward the candidate who can speak to competitive program development and coaching oversight — the gap between what was written and what was weighted becomes visible. Institutions that have done meaningful work to signal inclusivity and progressive values cannot afford to have their hiring outcomes tell a different story. That gap has a name, and nobody wants it applied to them.

This is where the pipeline matters. High-performance sport leadership — head coaching roles, strength and conditioning coaches, HP coordinators, competitive program architecture — has not been equally accessible to everyone. These roles have historically gone to a fairly narrow slice of the sport workforce. Not because others weren’t capable, but because access compounds: mentorship flows toward up and comers who share experiences with the mentor, come from the same places as the mentor, even those who look like the mentor! Networks self-replicate, and the shoulder tap — that informal moment where someone already inside decides who gets their shot next — tends to reproduce what already exists when it isn’t done consciously.

When it is done consciously, the shoulder tap can be transformative. It is one of the most direct mechanisms we have for disrupting who gets access to leadership in sport. But when it operates on normative bias — when familiarity masquerades as merit — it quietly narrows the field before the posting even goes live.

So when a role implicitly weights high performance credentials, the candidate pool it draws from reflects the inequities of the pipeline that shaped it. A department can genuinely want a diverse hire and still find that the job architecture worked against that outcome before a single application arrived.

This is not an argument against high-performance sport experience. Institutions need leaders who understand the realities of competitive sport, coaching environments, performance expectations, and the pressures that accompany them. But if a role is genuinely intended to sit at the intersection of high-performance outcomes and student-athlete experience, departments should be careful not to default to evaluating candidates through a primarily high-performance lens. Doing so risks treating one form of expertise as essential and the other as supplementary, even when the posting itself suggests both are central to the role. The question is not whether high-performance experience matters. The question is whether institutions are willing to recognize and weight other forms of expertise with equal seriousness when they say they value them.

The utopian version of this is simple, if not easy: two roles. One leader for high-performance outcomes with a mind for empathy and student athlete care (but maybe not the explicit experience). One for student experience, wellbeing, and development who comes from sport, loves sport and is invested in building systems that make sport more accessible (and profitable) for your institution. Some institutions have made this choice. It costs more and requires more coordination — because these two individuals need to operate from a shared vision, even when their day-to-day priorities diverge. But it also means both mandates are held equally — not balanced against each other by one person trying to serve two populations whose interests will not always align.

The Primary Stakeholder Dilemma in Athletics & Recreation

Let’s name something that does not get said clearly enough in post-secondary sport: the student-athlete is the primary stakeholder. The university exists to serve students, and the student-athlete is no exception. Every program, every service, every hire — in theory — flows from that commitment.

And yet this role asks its director to hold the needs of student-athletes alongside the needs of coaches. And in A&R, coaches are a valuable part of the ecosystem. They lead our teams, they produce cultures that help enhance the student-athlete experience, they drive results and contribute to the prestige of the university and the athletic program as a whole. They are an essential part that draws in community support. Their jobs are not easy and are also highly complex and multifaceted. This is a population that deserves high supports and comes with high expectations — the two factors being most effective when paired together. It can even be argued that investing in coaches directly impacts the experience of student-athletes: if a coach is burnt out, isolated, struggling with mental health, or fighting the system alone, that energy trickles down to the student-athletes.

But it is clear these groups are not the same population. A coach is an employee with a standard of performance they are expected to meet. A student-athlete is the client — still in a critical stage of their human development, still figuring out who they are beyond the sport. And at certain junctures — and there will be junctures — what is best for one will not be best for the other.

When a student comes forward with a concern about their coach, someone has to decide how that is handled. When performance demands push up against academic obligations or mental health needs, someone has to decide what gets prioritized. When a coaching decision creates a safety or equity concern, someone has to hold the line. These are not hypothetical scenarios. They are not edge cases. They are a regular feature of the role.

This is not an indictment of coaches. Most coaches in post-secondary sport are deeply invested in their athletes as people, not just performers. But the required institutional interests of a coaching staff and the developmental needs of a student-athlete population are structurally different — and a director who came up through a coaching pipeline carries a professional identity, a relational loyalty, and a frame of reference that was shaped by one side of that equation.

That does not make them wrong for the role. It makes the question of primary stakeholder orientation one worth asking explicitly — in the interview, in the onboarding, and in the ongoing performance conversations that follow.

Who does this role ultimately serve? Getting clear on that before you interview and ultimately hire will help ensure your expectations for the person in the role match the strengths they bring with them. And then build everything else around the answer.

When the Hire Becomes the Experiment: Who Absorbs the Risk and Consequences?

Imagine a department does the hard work. They recognize the pattern. They sit with the hard questions this posting asks of them. They commit to a diverse hire — someone who brings a different frame of reference, an equity lens, a background rooted in student development and athlete wellbeing rather than prioritizing competitive performance metrics above all else.

This is a good outcome. It is also a precarious one.

Because this person has now stepped into a role where the mandate is contested, the stakeholder tensions are real, and the infrastructure to support a non-traditional hire may not yet be in place. And the margin for error — the grace extended while someone finds their footing in a complex role — is rarely distributed equally.

When something goes wrong, and in a portfolio this size and complexity something will, the attribution matters enormously. If the challenge is understood as a function of the role’s design — the structural tensions we have already named — that is one conversation. If it gets absorbed into a quiet narrative about whether this person or “this type of person” is suited for this type of work, that is a completely different one. And a far more damaging one — not just for the individual, but for every diverse candidate considered for a similar role at that institution afterward.

This is how progress stalls. Not always through bad intentions. Sometimes through good intentions, an unclear mandate, and not enough infrastructure built around the person hired to carry it.

The hire that follows a difficult tenure tends to swing in the opposite direction. A correction that looks and feels like regression. And the cycle continues.

Departments that want to interrupt this pattern have to do more than hire diversely. They have to be honest — before the offer is made — about whether the conditions exist for this person to actually succeed.

Before You Hire: What the Process Owes the Person

If you have read this far, I am going to assume you are someone who genuinely wants to get this right. So let me offer something practical.

Know what you are actually missing. Not what looks good in a posting. Not what the last person in the role was good at. What frame of reference is genuinely absent from your department right now? And how might filling that gap better serve your department? What kind of thinking, what kind of relationships with students, what kind of values do you need someone to bring in? Get honest about that before you draft the competencies — because the competencies you list will determine the pool you draw from, and the pool you draw from will shape the outcome before anyone sits down to interview.

Ask yourself whether your department is ready to receive a different lens. Hiring diversely into a culture that is not prepared to hear a different perspective is not inclusion — it is exposure. Will this person’s approach to student wellbeing be embraced or quietly undermined? Will their equity instincts be seen as an asset or a complication? Will the coaches in your program receive them? Will your senior leadership team back them when a decision gets hard? These are not comfortable questions. They are necessary ones. And if the honest answer is that your culture has some work to do — that is not a reason to default to the safe hire. It is a reason to name it, plan for it, and show up differently. Progress does not wait for perfect conditions. But it does require honest ones.

Get buy-in on the vision before the hire arrives. If your leadership team is still debating what this role is fundamentally for after the offer has been accepted, you have waited too long. The person stepping into this role should not be the one brokering consensus on their own mandate. That work belongs to the department before the posting closes. And pay attention to how buy-in actually shows up — or doesn’t. Resistance rarely announces itself. It arrives as scheduling conflicts during the onboarding process, as budget objections to new initiatives, as “we’ve never done it that way.” A new hire should not have to spend their first year fighting for the legitimacy of their own role. That fight should already be won before they walk in the door.

Build real infrastructure around this person from day one — and be specific about what that means. Having a champion is not enough if that champion doesn’t have jurisdiction over the spaces where the friction will actually happen. The person who believes in this hire needs to be someone with direct influence over the coaching staff, the budget conversations, the operational decisions. Support from an adjacent office, however genuine, cannot reach into the rooms where resistance lives. Mentorship, thought partnership, and advocacy need to come from people who can intervene where it counts. There is always a learning curve regardless of how seasoned someone is — post-secondary athletics has its own ecosystem, its own rhythms, its own politics, and each institution’s version of that is different. What is the plan? Who is responsible for it? Expecting excellence without scaffolding is not a high bar. It is an unfair one.

Have conversations with them, not about them. This is the one that gets skipped most often — and the one that matters most. Diverse hires in sport leadership spaces frequently describe a specific and disorienting experience: being celebrated in the announcement and managed around in private. Decisions made in hallways. Concerns filtered through other people. Feedback that arrives too late to be useful. If you hire someone, refuse to have meaningful conversations about their performance, their fit, or their future without them in the room. That is not just a matter of respect. It is the minimum condition for someone to actually do the job you hired them to do.

Back your decision. Publicly and privately. When a coaching staff pushes back. When a decision is unpopular. When the learning curve is visible. You hired this person. The integrity of that decision lives in what you do after the offer letter is signed, not before.

There is a person out there who will step into this role at Guelph — or one like it at another institution — and they will bring something the department has not had before. I genuinely hope they are set up to succeed. I hope their supervisor advocates for them behind closed doors — because that makes all the difference in the hires sense of belonging and integration into the department as a whole. I hope their colleagues extend the same good faith they would want extended to themselves. I hope the student-athletes in that program feel the difference.

And I hope that whoever reads this — whether you are posting the job, sitting on the hiring committee, or stepping into the role yourself — finds something here worth carrying into the room.

The posting is just the beginning. What happens next is entirely up to you.