The Two V's of an Athletic Department

The Two V's of an Athletic Department

Voices and Votes

By Morgan J. Sullivan, CAA

Every athletic department runs on two things. Not budgets. Not facilities. Not the schedule you rebuilt four times before August. Those matter — but they're not what I mean.

I mean voices and votes.

Learn the difference, and the job gets clearer. Confuse them, and you'll spend your whole career exhausted, chasing approval you never had to win in the first place.

Everybody Gets a Voice

Walk into any gym in America on a Friday night, and you'll hear them. The dad three rows up who knows exactly who should be starting. The booster club member who thinks the schedule's too soft. The coach from a rival program with opinions about your hire. The parent group text that lit up before the final buzzer even sounded.

Voices are everywhere. And here's the part people miss: that's not a problem. That's a sign people care.

A silent athletic department is a dying one. When parents stop showing up, when boosters stop calling, when nobody has an opinion about your program — that's when you should worry. Voices mean investment. Voices mean the thing you're building matters to somebody besides you. But voices don't carry a vote.

A silent athletic department is a dying one. Voices mean people still care.

So no — the goal is never to silence the voices. The goal is to listen to them without being ruled by them. Those are very different skills, and learning to tell them apart is most of the job.

But Not Everybody Gets a Vote

Here's where it turns. A voice is an opinion. A vote is a responsibility.

The people with votes answer for the decision after it's made. The athletic director. The coaches. The athletic trainer weighing in on an athlete's health. The school administration. The Board of Education. When a call goes sideways, nobody turns to the loudest parent in the bleachers to explain it. They turn to the people who voted.

That's the trade. A vote comes with accountability attached. You don't get one without the other. The dad in row three can be wrong on Friday and forget about it by Saturday morning. The AD who's wrong owns it Monday morning, and every morning after.

A voice is an opinion. A vote is a responsibility. They don't carry the same weight.

Understand that, and something shifts. You stop taking every opinion as a demand. You start hearing them as input — valuable input, sometimes — but input that lands on your desk, not decisions made for you.

Why This Gets Confused

The trouble starts when the two blur together. And they blur constantly.

A loud enough voice can start to feel like a vote. Enough emails, enough hallway conversations, enough pressure — and a new AD can start managing the noise instead of leading the program. You begin making decisions to quiet people down rather than because they're right. That's when the department stops being led and starts being pushed around.

It happens the other way, too. Sometimes the people with votes forget to listen to the voices at all. They pull the door shut, decide everything behind it, and wonder why the community feels shut out. A vote isn't permission to stop hearing people. It's a responsibility to hear them and then decide what's right.

The best athletic directors I know live right in that tension. Doors open. Ears open. And a spine that holds when the decision has to be theirs.

For the Voices

If you're a parent, a booster, a fan — someone with a voice and no vote — I want you to hear this the right way. Your voice matters. It genuinely does. The best programs are built with community input, not in spite of it.

But there's a difference between offering your voice and demanding it be treated as a vote. When you sit down with an AD or a coach, come as someone sharing perspective — not someone issuing a verdict. Ask questions before you draw conclusions. Assume the people in the chairs are seeing things you can't from the stands. Because usually, they are.

And know this: the AD who listens to you carefully and still decides differently isn't ignoring you. They're doing their job. They carry the accountability that comes with the vote — the accountability you hand back the moment the game ends.

For the Votes

And if you're one of the ones holding a vote — this is the harder charge.

Don't hide behind it. The vote isn't a wall you build to keep people out. It's a weight you carry so the program can move forward. Use it that way.

Listen longer than feels comfortable. Let the voices in, even when they're loud, even when they're wrong, even when you already know where you'll land. People will forgive a decision they disagree with far more easily than they'll forgive never being heard. Then, when the moment comes, decide. Own it. Stand in it. That's what the vote is for.

The Bottom Line

An athletic department full of voices and short on votes is chaos. One full of votes and deaf to voices is cold, and it won't last. The healthy ones have both—a community that speaks up freely, and leaders steady enough to listen hard and still carry the decision.

Know which one you're holding. Respect them both. That's the whole game.

LEAD · TEACH · GROW

Talkin' with the AD  ·  betteryouthcoaching.com

Morgan J. Sullivan — athletic director, coach, and author of the books Coach on Leadership, Middle School Education-Based Athletics, and Before the First Snap