Turnaround leadership is a topic of particular interest within sports as many coaches are revered for their ability to transform a struggling team into a “winner.” A limited amount of research (Vallee & Bloom, 2005; Schroeder, 2010), however, has examined program building coaches that have led transformational team turnarounds. Therefore, the methods and intangibles necessary for achieving a coaching turnaround have remained undetermined to date. The present study examined high school football coaches (n=11) from the state of Michigan, who were noted for leading a dramatic turnaround at their high school over the course of the previous decade. In-depth interviews were conducted with each coach and hierarchical content analyses were conducted and a grounded theory developed. Prior to accepting their turnaround coaching positions, the high school teams the coaches chose to lead, had not experienced a winning season over a prolonged period of time (mean = 7.2 years). Meanwhile, five of the 11 programs had never qualified for the state playoffs in school history.Results revealed that upon being hired, these turnaround coaches experienced relatively quick success as they achieved a winning record (M = 1.73 years), and reached the state playoffs in a short period of time (M = 1.82 years), with each of the 11 teams achieving a winning record and qualifying for the playoffs within three years of hiring their new coach. Steps of the turnaround process observed across the coaches included establishing a vision for program success, assembling a staff of positive role models, formulating a strong plan, continuously selling their vision, generating buy-in from players and key members of the program, creating and celebrating early achievements, sustaining success through the establishment of new goals and benchmarks, and fighting the urge to become complacent once new levels of success were reached. Each of the turnaround coaches also reported incorporating a respectable strength and conditioning program into their team culture. Meanwhile, the philosophies of the majority of the coaches were characterized as “educational athletics,” in which they viewed their job as an extension of the classroom. Coaches often implemented character education into their football program and used their coaching position as a platform for teaching life lessons to their players. However, the most recurrent theme of the turnarounds, and the most recommended approach for achieving a coaching turnaround was establishing positive coach-athlete relationships. Every coach interviewed stressed that good coach-athlete relationships were an important component of their turnarounds. The steps and processes for generating a coaching turnaround are discussed, along with connections to previous studies and personal accounts of coaching turnarounds. Implications are included, along with limitations and directions for future research.
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