Tennessee Soccer Stats | Results & Team Analytics | June 2026

The Coaching Carousel

Every spring I notice another program announce a new head coach. I pulled twelve years of rosters to see how much the sideline really turns over, and whether the coaches who stay actually win more.

A soccer roster turns over completely every four years no matter what: that's just graduation. The coach is the one thread that can hold a program together across those cycles, so I wanted to know how often that thread actually holds.

I read the head coach and assistant staff off every TSSAA roster from 2014-15 through 2025-26, linked each coach across seasons and schools, and joined them to the ELO ratings and results from this site. One caveat up front: this only sees the last twelve years, so a coach who started before 2014 looks like they began in 2014 here; the long-tenured numbers below are floors, not full careers.

How Fast It Spins

Share of programs that changed head coach from the previous season

Head-Coach Turnover by Season

Of programs fielding a team in back-to-back years, the percent that swapped head coach · hover for counts

Does Staying Pay Off?

Head-coach tenure against win rate — the continuity question

Win Rate by Length of Tenure

Head coaches grouped by seasons on the job (min. 20 games) · bar = average win rate

The longer a coach stays, the more their teams win, and it is not a small gap. Coaches in their second or third season sit under 40 percent; those who last seven years or more average above 50. Some of that is survivorship: win and you keep your job. But it lines up with what the Zip Code report found at Bearden, where a quarter-century of two coaches built the state's top program. Continuity is its own kind of talent.

The Lifers

Every coach with a nine-year-or-longer run at one program: scroll the list (tenure is capped by our 12-year window). Diamonds mark state titles.

Longest-Serving Head Coaches

Consecutive seasons at one school · with win rate and the program's peak ELO under them

#	Coach	Program	Years	Win %	Peak ELO

The Title Collectors

State championships credited to the head coach on the bench (2014-15 on) · click a coach to see every title and where they coached

Most State Championships

Finals won across all classes and both genders · runner-up finishes shown alongside

#	Coach	Titles	Runner-up	Win %	Title years

The Winningest & the Best

By win rate, and by the highest ELO a coach's program ever reached

Highest Win Rate

Head coaches, minimum 40 games

#	Coach	Win %	Games

Highest Program Peak ELO

Best rating reached under each coach (min. 30 games)

#	Coach	Peak ELO	Win %

The Movers

Coaches who jumped programs, and assistants who climbed to the top job · click a coach for their path

Most Programs Coached

Distinct schools across the window · 3+ programs

#	Coach	Region	Programs	Seasons

Biggest Coaching Staffs

Most assistants on one team in one season · click to see the staff

#	Program	Season	Assts

Where This Goes Next

Companion · Published

The Experience Report

The flip side of the carousel: whether the experience players accumulate (and the coach they keep) actually shows up in wins, and why age barely does.

Companion · Published

The Freshman Report

Roster retention and player movement: who keeps their freshmen, and which programs pull players in from elsewhere.

Related · Published

The Zip Code Effect

Where coaching continuity first came up: Bearden's two-coach, 25-year run as the clearest outlier to the wealth-and-winning correlation.

How This Was Built

The data, the definitions, and what to be careful about

Data

Head coaches and assistant lists were read from every TSSAA team roster, 2014-15 through 2025-26 (tssaasports.com). Win rates and ELO come from Tennessee Soccer Stats' game log; state-championship results come from our tournament registry (TSSAA finals back to 1986).

Coach identity

A coach is matched by normalized full name across seasons and schools. One coach commonly runs both the boys and girls team at a school; that's treated as one person. A name is flagged ambiguous (and dropped from leaderboards) only when it appears at two different schools in the same season; 32 of ~3,200 coaches are excluded this way.

Definitions

"Tenure" / "longest stint" is consecutive seasons as head coach at one school. "Win rate" counts ties as half a win. "Peak ELO" is the highest rating that coach's team reached. A "promotion" is an assistant who later becomes a head coach in a strictly later season. State titles are credited to the head coach of the winning team that season.

Caveats

Tenure is censored to our 2014-15 roster window, so 12 years is the maximum visible and long careers that began earlier (e.g. Eric Turner's 18 years at Bearden) are undercounted.
Championships are only attributable to a coach from 2014-15 on, where we have rosters; older finals (140 of them) are in the data but can't be tied to a coach.
Coach names occasionally vary in spelling between seasons, which can split or merge a coach.

Sources

Coaching staffs (head coach + assistants) read from TSSAA team rosters, 2014-15 through 2025-26, via tssaasports.com.
Win rates and ELO ratings computed by Tennessee Soccer Stats from publicly available match results. Tenure figures are censored to the 2014-15 start of the roster archive and understate careers that began earlier.

Tennessee Soccer Stats (TSSE) is a personal, independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the TSSAA or any school. Coach identity is matched by name across seasons; a small number of common-name coaches are excluded where they could not be told apart. Win rate counts ties as half a win.