Program Economy

Support Staff

Every program — yours and every rival — fields four core support staff roles on top of the head coach, plus a fifth optional one. A great hire is an ongoing edge, and a bad or empty seat is an ongoing cost.

Four Core Roles, Four Jobs

Every program starts with these four filled, and the AI auto-hires into any that ever falls vacant, so you'll never actually run a season without them:

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 four 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.

Your staff as a whole is also its own quiet factor, separate from what each individual role does. A genuinely strong staff across the board — not just one standout hire — gives every prospect on your board a small extra nudge toward your program, and gives your whole roster's mood a small, steady lift week to week. Let your staff quality slip broadly low across the board, and both effects flip into a drag instead. It's a small effect by design (similar in size to a player's own homesickness), but it means program culture is a real, whole-staff outcome, not just the sum of four separate report cards.

Staff quality really does track prestige, and the gap doesn't close on its own. Across the league, a blue-blood's support staff consistently rates well above a rebuilding program's, and that gap holds at every stage of a long dynasty — AI programs don't all keep trading up forever, and every so often a rival's hire quietly slips a notch (an assistant plateaus, a hire that looked great on paper turns out average), so the league doesn't just inflate as a whole. Expect a genuine ceiling on who you can hire while you're still building a name for your program, and expect real competition for better candidates to open up as your own prestige climbs — see "Hiring Is a Negotiation, Not a Tap" below. Budget-wise, staff salaries typically run somewhere around a fifth to a quarter of your Revenue Share at every tier — a real, ongoing bill regardless of how big or small your program is, not something you grow out of.

Even a rebuilding program gets the occasional shot at a name above its station. Your own hiring pool — not the AI's — every so often surfaces one long-shot candidate who's a real step above what your current prestige would normally attract, priced accordingly. It's not a guarantee and it won't happen every time you open the hire screen, but it means a rebuild is never structurally locked out of landing a standout hire — including, occasionally, one with the Inside Track instinct below.

The Optional Fifth: Assistant Recruiter

Nobody starts with an Assistant Recruiter — unlike the four core roles above, it's a deliberate investment you choose to make, the same way you'd choose to fund a facility upgrade. His value isn't a passive rating bonus at all; it's pure capacity. Hiring one lets him run a scouting trip in parallel with your Regional Recruiter instead of both staffers queuing behind a single trip, so a program that hires both can run two Regional Sweeps — or a Regional Sweep and a Prospect Trip — at the same time.

The Rare "Inside Track" Instinct

Every so often, a Regional Recruiter or Assistant Recruiter comes with a special, independent gift on top of their rating: an instinct for uncovering a recruit with a real, personal tie to your program — a hometown pull, a mutual contact, something that gives you a genuine shot at someone who'd normally have no reason to look your way. It's not something every strong recruiter has, and it isn't tied to how highly they're rated — you'll see an "Inside Track" badge on their card, on the hire screen and everywhere else you review your staff, when a candidate or current hire has it. If you're hoping to land one, that badge is exactly what to look for while browsing the hiring pool.

A recruiter with this instinct can surface at most one such discovery per season — it'll show up as an inbox story naming the recruit, with a direct link to their scouting report. When it happens, that recruit is a real, outsized favorite to actually sign with you if you go after them — not a guarantee, but a genuine, memorable shot at someone recruiting alone would never have put on your board. See Recruiting for more on where these hidden ties come from.

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/Goalies/Special Teams/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, the facility manager tells you whether it's time to pay upkeep or push for a bigger renovation, and — if you've hired one — your Assistant Recruiter tells you when the extra trip capacity is worth the cost. The advice is only as good as the staffer: an elite hire speaks with confidence and specifics, a weak one hedges or doubts himself.

Tap the "i" next to any staffer's advice card for a plain "Behind the Scenes" explanation of what that role is actually doing for you mechanically — not just this week's quote, but the underlying job:

Development Coach decides which players your weekly training points go to whenever you use auto-training, and sets each one's focus. A sharp coach targets your highest-upside young players; a weaker one leans on instinct and pours points into veterans who won't improve much. He also influences how many training points you bank each week.
Assistant Coach sets your lines, special teams, and ice time whenever you use the auto tools, and shapes your scheme quality in games. A strong assistant nails the deployment; a weaker one makes mistakes — a good player on the wrong line, or too many minutes for your bottom six.
Regional Recruiter flags talent and gives your offers an edge with prospects from his region — a strong one opens up his whole area, a weak one barely moves the needle — and gets scouting trips done faster (a weak recruiter's trip can take the full 4 weeks, an elite one just 1).
Facility Manager slows how fast your rink wears down and keeps upkeep cheaper. A strong one holds the building near pristine for less; a weak one lets it decay and costs you more in repairs.
Assistant Recruiter carries no passive bonus of his own — the whole value is the extra trip capacity, sending a second scouting trip in parallel with your Regional Recruiter's.

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.

Your recruiters can run your in-season scouting on their own, too. Each hired Regional Recruiter or Assistant Recruiter gets their own independent toggle right on their card — turn one on and they'll plan and send their own scouting trips (and spend banked scouting points) every week without you touching the Scouting page at all. This is the single best fix if you tend to simulate through the season without scouting much: your recruiting staff keeps working the board for you instead of your program showing up to the offseason with no head start on anyone. See Scouting Prospects for what the toggle actually does and the budget it draws from.

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.

Clearing the interest bar doesn't always seal the deal, either — the Hire button only appears once interest clears the floor, but a well-regarded candidate (or one who's just plain stubborn) may still come back wanting more before they'll actually sign. When that happens you'll see what it would take to close them: meet their price on the spot, or walk away and keep negotiating with the slider yourself. If even your best possible offer isn't enough, that's the same "no offer closes it" wall above — you'll need more program prestige, not more money.

You can only replace an already-filled role once per season. Swapping out an incumbent for someone new spends that role's one replacement for the year — the Replace button greys out afterward with a note explaining why, and the "stronger option available" nudge won't keep pointing at a role you've already turned over. Think it through before pulling the trigger on a Replace. Releasing a staffer and leaving the seat vacant isn't affected by this — you can always fire and then hire fresh into an empty role.

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 and your own salary as head coach, so all three 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.