Looks like there's alot of changes going to happen up in Rochester!

http://www.uslsoccer.com/home/369394.html

According to this release, the club is not renewing the contract for Head Coach Darren Tilley OR President/GM Mark Ford!

Maybe someone closer to the situation can explain where this is all coming from?

Here's another article about the Rochester situation;

http://www.bigapplesoccer.com/sections/usl2.php?article_id=20285

This all leaves me with the following impressions;

1. The owners handled this very badly! According to the story, the GM hadn't even seen the press release before it was published! Didn't they learn anything from the NY Mets and the Willy Randolph situation?

2. I think their ownership is making a BIG mistake if they think that they can combine the GM & Head Coach positions!

a. There is an inherent (sp?) conflict-of-interest between the 2 positions. A coach identifies the players that he wants and the GM negotiates the contracts! That way, business decisions (and limitations) are handed down by the "front office" and does not jeopardize the play/coach relationship because of business matters.

b. There is too much work (or should be) at this level for one person to handle the day-to-day duties of what should be done by both positions. They also have two very different skill sets that require alot of time and effort in different directions.

This is a bad sign for a club supposedly at Rochester's level. "Penny wise and pound foolish" if you ask me!

Yeah, because Gavin Wilkinson has had no success at it.

Oh, wait.

It can be done. Gavin has done pretty well at it. But you have to have an owner who understands and will distribute the responsibilities that need to be done the others can do so he's not overloaded.

Yes, Gavin Wilkinson has had some success while wearing the titles of Head Coach/GM...but I stand by my statement.

Portland's staff situation seemes to be as such that their President (Paulson?) seems to handle most of the off-field duties that I would say are usually handled by a General Manager.

Most USL 1st or 2nd Division teams staffs are small. I am not there to witness how they do things, but I doubt very much that Wilkinson runs the day-to-day operation of the office, looks for and negotiates sponsorship deals, spearheads and oversees ticket sales, coordinates PR/Media efforts, researches and negotiates facility arrangements, insurance policies, handles human resource issues such as hiring, payroll or benefits, etc, etc, etc....that is without going on in more detail of either job.

That is what I mean by the fact that the duties of a "General Manager" and a "Head Coach" require two people!

But the actual duties you talked about in your initial post on the subject were about player personnel duties, not running the office. You can have a team president or somebody run the office and day to day stuff. Coaches aren't any good at that stuff, nor should they be.

You can have a GM or you can call your GM a technical director, or you can have a president or a CEO or a COO and give all player personnel decisions to your coach.

In a small-staff situation like you describe in USL-1 or (especially) USL-2, the office should be concentrating on one thing: sales. Sales, sales, sales. And doing the paperwork you have to do to make sure the lights go on at the stadium and your players are eligible. That's it. That's the list.

But there's no real reason why a coach couldn't also have the player personnel duties you described originally. In fact, in a small-staff situation, it makes even MORE sense because that removes part of that burden from a front office that should be concentrating on, again, SELLING. Not negotiating whether some jackass from Western Carolina gets $2,000 a month or $2,500 a month. The coach knows who he wants and what the guy's worth more than the fricking bottom-line-watching GM. Give the coach a budget and say go and get whoever the hell you want and pay them collectively up to this amount and don't go over and other than that, stay out of the way.

Because - and this will be a shock to some of you - whether you have Player A or Player B who's slightly cheaper, at this level, doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot to the overall survival prospects of the team. It's the quality of Salesperson A versus Salesperson B that's going to be much more important than which foreign or college left outside mid you overspend for.

That's just ridiculous.

So quit moving the fricking goalposts.

I think things turned out just fine with Rob hiring Pat Ercoli as the GM & Bob Lilley as the head coach.