Coach Attributes & Your Career

Your program's roster isn't the only thing that grows over a dynasty — you do too. The Coach tab tracks four attributes you personally level up with experience earned over the season, plus the career record those seasons leave behind: milestones, a trophy cabinet, and the rivalries your program builds one game at a time.

Coach Attributes

You have four attributes, each 1–99:

These four are the baseline your support staff builds on — your Development Coach and Assistant Coach add their own bonus (or drag) on top of whatever your own attributes already provide, so a strong head coach and a strong staff genuinely compound, and a weak coach can undercut even a great staff hire. See Support Staff.

They matter beyond their direct effects, too: the average of all four is your overall coaching competence, and that same number quietly determines how well your program improvises when you're not personally steering — how sharply your staff handles a Media & Narrative Event you skip or opt out of, or a Bye Week you don't plan yourself. Raising your attributes doesn't just make you better at four specific things; it makes your whole program sharper in the moments it's running on autopilot.

Spending XP

Raising an attribute costs banked XP, and each attribute gets pricier to raise the higher it climbs — roughly 50 XP per point in its first 20 points, then 65, 80, 95, and finally 110 XP per point once it's deep into the 80s. Maxing a single attribute from a typical starting point costs on the order of several thousand XP; maxing all four is a real, decades-long dynasty achievement, not something a strong season or two unlocks. Expect a long, successful career to max out two or three attributes and make real progress on the fourth — pick a priority rather than trying to spread every point evenly.

You can spend banked XP in two places: the dedicated Coach Development step of the offseason (where the spend applies immediately), or any time during the season from the Coach tab itself (which confirms the spend with a prompt first).

Earning XP

The season-end bonuses stack, so the gap between seasons is enormous: a mediocre year that misses the board's target and stays home from the tournament nets well under 100 XP total, while an elite season — winning record, board target cleared and then some, a National Tournament bid, and a national title, on top of ~25 wins along the way — can bank well over 500. A signature season is worth years of grinding out .500 hockey, so the biggest lever for leveling up your coach is simply having a great year, not micromanaging every single win. See Program Prestige & Your Job Security for exactly how the board's win target is set.

Career Milestones

Sixteen career achievements, each unlocked once and permanently, logged with the season and program where you earned it:

• First Win
• 50 / 100 / 200 Career Wins
• First Conference Title
• First National Tournament Bid
• Final Freeze Appearance
• National Championship
• 10-Year Coaching Veteran
• Developed a Pro Draft Pick
• $1M / $5M / $10M Career Earnings
• 5 / 15 / 30 Games of the Week — counts every time your team is featured, not just the ones you win

The Coach tab shows only what you've achieved until you expand it, at which point the full checklist appears with your live progress toward everything still locked — including "10-Year Coaching Veteran," which counts your actual tenure since your first season on the bench, and "Developed a Pro Draft Pick," which triggers the moment any player currently on your roster has been drafted, whether or not they've signed and left campus yet.

Rivalries

Rivalries in your career aren't a fixed, preset list — they emerge from what you actually play. Every opponent you face builds a running head-to-head record (wins, losses, and postseason meetings, which count for extra) from the very first time you play them. But a couple of close games don't make a rivalry — a pairing needs at least 10 meetings on the books, and the two programs still need to be roughly comparable in prestige, before the game recognizes it as a genuine rivalry.

That's usually 2-4 real seasons of history for a brand-new pairing — except a handful of matchups that start flagged as rivalries from day one of a new dynasty. If your program has a storied in-conference rival (check its program history — a fair number of schools have one written in), that game is treated as a rivalry immediately.

• Games against that opponent are flagged as a rivalry, with their own inbox headline for the result.
• That matchup becomes eligible to trigger a "Rivalry Week" media moment the week you play them.

A rivalry can also fade: if one program's prestige pulls far enough ahead of the other's, the gap is simply too wide for the matchup to keep reading as a genuine rivalry, regardless of how many times you've played. It's a claim about two comparable programs, not just a raw game count.

Rivalries stay rare on purpose: only your three fiercest series ever carry the badge at once, even if you've built up qualifying history against more opponents than that. A pairing has to be one of your top three and one of the other program's top three — if your history with a team is real but that program has fiercer rivalries elsewhere, the badge won't fire for that matchup. Your Coach tab surfaces those three — ranked by how heated the series actually is, not just how many times you've played them — each with the full series record and how your last meeting went.

Rivalries aren't just about you. Any two programs in the league can build one from their own head-to-head history, AI-vs-AI included — the same rules apply either way. Open any team's profile to see a Rivals section listing that program's own fiercest rivals, tap into any of them for the same series breakdown your own rivalries get, and watch for the RIVALRY badge on League Scores game cards, box scores, and pre-game previews around the league — not just your own games. The League tab's own Rivalries page ranks every qualifying rivalry across the whole league (or just your conference) by how heated it is, so you can browse the fiercest series anywhere in the sport, not only the ones involving your own program.

Your Salary & the Coaching Carousel

You draw an annual salary, paid from your program's Revenue Share — the same pool that funds your support staff and facility upkeep, so a big raise for you genuinely competes with those other bills. What you're paid depends on two things: your own reputation (attributes plus career accomplishments) and, more heavily, what the program you coach for can and will pay — a modest coach at a blue-blood still earns strong money, while a proven coach stuck at a small program earns far less than he could get elsewhere. That gap is exactly what the coaching carousel is about.

When your résumé outgrows your current job — a strong season, a deep tournament run, attribute XP banked over a long career — rival programs take notice. You may see:

• An outside job offer — a specific program, contract length, and salary, all shown up front before you decide whether to jump.
• A retention counter-offer from your own program, trying to keep you: a contract extension, a genuine raise to your salary, an improved job-security bump, and a boost to your program's NIL recruiting-budget ceiling (funded by your booster collective). The raise is sized off your own program's stature, so a bigger, wealthier program retaining you is a bigger deal — in dollar terms — than a small one doing the same.

Turning down every outside offer costs nothing; a counter-offer, once accepted, locks in immediately. There's no penalty for staying loyal to a program that still fits your ambitions.

When your own contract reaches its final year, that choice becomes yours to make too — your program puts a renewal offer on the table, and you have to accept it (or take a competing offer instead) before the offseason can move on. Solid job security earns a genuine multi-year renewal at your current market rate. Shaky security only gets you a year-to-year deal — no raise, and possibly a pay cut — while the board watches to see if things turn around. Either way, you're never left without a program: a renewal offer from your current school is always on the table alongside whatever outside interest shows up.

Sick of your current team? You don't have to wait for someone to notice you or ride out a bad season to force a move. Any offseason, browse every program in the league yourself and resign to take one over directly — no outside offer required. Only programs within reach of your current reputation are open (you can always step down to a smaller name, but reaching for one bigger than your résumé supports isn't on the table yet); it's the same standard the job market itself uses to size up outside interest in you. Whoever's coaching your target program loses their job and joins the league's pool of unemployed coaches, free to resurface at another program down the road — not left stranded either. You get one job change per offseason, though — whether you accept an outside offer or resign into a program yourself, that's your move for this carousel; the screen will show you're already settled at your new job rather than letting you keep shopping.

Your current salary and lifetime coaching earnings are both visible on your Coach tab — and on any rival coach's profile too, so you can see what a coach across the league is actually making. Career earnings also carry their own milestone tier ($1M, $5M, $10M lifetime), alongside your win-count and championship achievements.

Market Value & the Coach Power Ranking

Your Coach tab shows a Market Value badge (0–99) right in your identity row — your reputation on the coaching job market, the same number athletic directors weigh when deciding whether to pursue you for an opening and how much leverage you hold once they do. It's built from your four attributes plus your career résumé (wins, conference titles, national championships) — the same "reputation" the salary/ carousel section above already talks about, just given a visible number.

That same figure is also what ranks every coach in the league — yours and every AI coach's — on the League tab's Coach Power Ranking, adjusted by how this season is actually going relative to that program's preseason expectation. An elite coach having a down year at a good program can slide down the board; a mid-tier coach overachieving at a modest one can climb it — team prestige alone doesn't decide the order. Two extra columns ride along: "Sec" is job security (0–100 — a flame marks a coach on the hot seat below 30) and "W" is career wins. Tap the "i" next to the ranking to see the exact formula in-app any time.

See Also

• Program Prestige & Your Job Security — the board target your XP bonuses are measured against
• Support Staff — how staff hires stack on top of your own attributes
• Player Development — your Development attribute's effect on roster growth
• Media & Narrative Events — where your overall coaching competence shows up when you're not at the wheel
• Recruiting & Scouting Prospects — your Recruiting attribute's effect
• Scheduling & the Season Calendar — how a Game of the Week is picked