Support Staff
Every program — yours and every rival — fields four support staff roles on top of the head coach. This isn't a cosmetic layer: a great hire is an ongoing edge, and a bad or empty seat is an ongoing cost.
Four Roles, Four Jobs
- Assistant Coach sharpens (or dulls) your offensive and defensive scheme quality, which shapes how well your lineup, special teams, and in-game tactics perform on top of whatever your head coach already brings.
- Development Coach speeds up or slows down how fast your players improve, in two ways at once: a bigger or smaller weekly training-points pool, and smarter or worse targeting of who those points go to. A strong dev coach steers points toward your highest-upside young players; a weak one wastes them on veterans who have nowhere left to grow. See Player Development.
- Regional Recruiter widens your recruiting pull in — and, to a lesser extent, near — their assigned region, and hands you extra scouting points on top.
- Facility Manager slows how fast your buildings wear down. It never reverses existing wear, but a strong manager buys you time before upkeep or a renovation becomes urgent. See Facilities & Arena.
A mediocre hire in any of these roles isn't neutral filler — a bad Development Coach costs your roster's growth, a bad Assistant Coach costs you scheme quality, a bad Facility Manager lets your buildings crumble faster. This isn't a screen you can safely ignore.
Every Role Also Gives You Spoken Advice
Each staffer speaks up on the screen where their role matters — the assistant flags a tactical read on your Lines/System/Ice Time tabs, the development coach names the highest-upside player your training plan should target, the recruiter calls out the strongest still-open prospect in his region, and the facility manager tells you whether it's time to pay upkeep or push for a bigger renovation. The advice is only as good as the staffer: an elite hire speaks with confidence and specifics, a weak one hedges or doubts himself.
Delegate to Staff
If you'd rather not micromanage every week, you can hand lines, tactics, ice time, and training over to your staff on autopilot — four independent toggles, each one running the same tool your staffer already advises on, automatically, every week. Delegating doesn't upgrade a weak hire: a mediocre assistant makes the same mistakes on autopilot that he'd make if you tapped the button yourself.
Hiring Is a Negotiation, Not a Tap
Landing a great candidate takes a genuine offer, not a click. Every candidate has their own interest level, driven by your salary offer and how your program's prestige compares to their own reputation:
- A modest candidate is easy to sign near their asking price almost anywhere.
- A star candidate eyeing a middling program needs a strong offer to bite — and past a wide enough gap between your program's stature and theirs, no offer closes it. Building program prestige is what eventually lets you compete for that tier of hire.
Your hiring pool refreshes at a steady pace rather than resetting every time you open the screen, so there's no benefit to repeatedly closing and reopening it hoping for a better name to appear.
Contracts, Salaries & Turnover
Staff sign multi-year contracts and are paid from Revenue Share, the same wallet that funds facilities, so the two compete for the same money. Firing someone before their contract is up costs a buyout. Staff age and eventually retire, just like a head coach, and a staffer let go or displaced doesn't vanish — they can resurface at another program down the road.
See Also
- Facilities & Arena — Revenue Share's other recurring bill
- Finances — where staff salaries come from
- Player Development — what a good Development Coach changes