Patrick Roy was named as the new coach of the Colorado Avalanche today. His previous coaching experience consisted of coaching his sons in Junior Hockey (very successfully.)
The Colorado Rockies named Walt Weiss manager of the team before this season. His prior coaching experience was managing his sons High School team (won the state championship in Colorado.) The hitting coach is Dante Bichette, whose only coaching experience was coaching his sons Little League team (made it to the LLWS.) The Rockies are in first place in the NL West, where they finished dead last in 2012. They lead the league in runs scored and RBI.
These teams throw in guys with no professional managerial experience and they seem to do fine. Compare that with what the Cubs did with Ryne Sandburg, who went through single A, AA, and AAA, all successfully, but they passed on giving him the big job. Josh McDaniels was groomed to be a head coach by Bill Belicheck and New England, but was an utter disaster when given the chance by the Broncos.
Do we put too much emphasis on experience in coaches? Do they really need to come up through the ranks, or do some just have a knack for running a team?
I quite honestly don’t believe it makes much of a difference in baseball, inasmuch as
The manager generally has very little effect on the performance of his players, and
There’s not a lot of difference anymore in strategy.
In hockey I believe it can make a difference. I cannot think offhand of very many successful coaches who did not serve time as assistant coaches or coach in major junior or minor league hockey to learn the trade.
Another baseball example: Robin Ventura is in his second year as manager of the White Sox; I believe that he had no managerial or coaching experience, at either the major-league or minor-league level, before being named Sox manager. In his first season, his team came within 3 games of a division title.
Same story with Mike Matheny, and his first team came within one win of the World Series.
One thing you may notice about the successful examples (other than being from baseball which is a relatively low-managerial-impact sport, IMO) is that they generally had pretty long playing careers.
One of the key factors in the Matheny appointment, at least according to the GM, was his innate leadership abilities. Which would, I suppose, tie in to the notion that some people just “have what it takes”.
I think that you’re misunderstanding the term “Major Junior hockey”. The major-junior leagues in Canada are professional leagues (with the added bonus that they barely need to pay their players :rolleyes: ). It’s pretty much the only route to the NHL for players in Canada (the only really viable alternative that I know of is going the NCAA route in the US).
It is fairly common for coaches to make the jump from major-junior directly to the NHL. It’s probably most common for teams in the midst of a youth movement – a strong coach from major-junior team has demonstrated the ability to work with and develop young talent, which is extremely important. I would probably compare it to an NFL team hiring a head coach from a strong NCAA program.
There are a lot of other routes to being an NHL head coach, of course. Lots of coaches are hired from the AHL (NHL’s equivalent to AAA baseball) or were NHL assistant coaches.
I would say that the real value in experience is that it demonstrates that you have the ability to be a head coach. There are of course other considerations for a GM, like the fact that you’re unlikely to get as much criticism if an established coach flops.