Cheer Coaches: How to Get the Job

Getting your first coaching job can be tough because, just like any other job, it’s hard to get your foot in the door if you don’t have any experience yet. Of course, you can’t get coaching experience without getting a coaching job. You probably do have plenty of applicable experience though, even if it’s not with an official “coach” title. Follow these 10 tips during the interview to help you get the job: Think outside the box. You haven’t been an official coach yet, but you’ve probably done plenty of things that show coaching skills. Think of what you’ve done in the past that might relate, like working with school, church, or community groups. Showing you have experience working with and managing a group of people will help. Get creative and ask your friends and relatives for any ideas for things you’ve done that have given you experience with teaching, leadership, or other skills a coach needs. Don’t forget about volunteer positions. Experience is experience whether you did it for an actual paid job or for a class, internship, fun, etc. Brag about your cheer skills. You don’t have to be a world champion cheerleader to be a good cheer coach, but talking about your experience as an athlete does help. Talk about how long you cheered for and any accomplishments you or your team achieved. Maybe you were the captain or your team placed at a competition or you cheered all through high school. All those are things a school’s athletic director or a gym owner will want to know about. Don’t worry if you weren’t a star cheerleader. Showing any cheer experience and accomplishments will help, but not having any to show won’t necessarily hurt you. You could be the best cheerleader in the world, but it does’t really matter if you can’t teach other people how to do it. There is a lot more to coaching than being able to tumble or do the splits. Coaches have to do lot of administrative things like collecting forms and fees, communicating with parents, figuring out transportation, planning practices and events, ordering cheer gear, etc. Cheerleading skills help, but they aren’t necessarily the same thing as coaching skills. Remember specific stories. Come prepared to an interview with some examples of times you have showed coaching skills while you were a cheerleader. Maybe you helped pick out or order uniforms, maybe you helped a teammate work on some skills outside of practice or walked new teammates through one of your squad’s cheers. Maybe your squad even ran a cheer camp or clinic for younger cheerleaders. Think of specific examples to bring up that show you are able to do some common coaching jobs like teaching and leading as well as administrative or managerial tasks like ordering equipment or scheduling camps, competitions, and other cheer events. Mention any qualifications you have. If you have CPR or other safety training, be sure to bring that up. Ask if there are any online courses you can take or weekend clinics you can attend to expand your skills. Many schools require their coaches to take courses on concussions and other important sport issues anyway, so showing that you are eager to learn and increase your skill set will be attractive to someone hiring a coach. Dress professionally. You don’t have to pull out (or go buy) a fancy suit, but make sure you look like someone who can handle being in charge of a group of cheerleaders. This will also let the person hiring the new coach know that you care about getting the job. You might look funny if you dress formal for an interview in an athletic facility, so just take it a step up from what you’d normally wear there. If you normally see people walking around in practice shorts or warmup pants, wear khaki shorts or pants and a nicer shirt. Be friendly. Chances are the person hiring you will also be working pretty closely with you, so show them that you’d be a good person to work with! Show that you are competent, friendly, and easy to get along with. Ask questions. Show that you are genuinely interested in the team and the position. Ask how many athletes you will have, whether you’ll have a staff (and if so whether you will be in charge of hiring them), what the hours are, what the practice facility and schedule is like, whether you’ll be expected to fundraise, and what else the cheer coach is responsible for. Put yourself in their shoes. Imagine that you are an athletic director or gym owner who needs to hire a new cheerleading coach. What would you want to know? What kind of candidate would you be looking for? Think of how you would be an asset to the program, and convey that in your interview! Cheer coaches, what other advice do you have for aspiring coaches?