On most spring afternoons at Whittier College, you won't find Michael J. McBride holed up in his office grading papers or writing. Instead, he'll be on the softball field, hitting grounders and pop flies to players who know him not only as a tenured professor, but as a coach.
Mr. McBride has taught political science at the college for 33 years and has been able to juggle teaching, scholarship, and service to the institution while coaching its women's softball team at various times since he helped found the Division III program in 1982.
Although the National Collegiate Athletic Association does not track the number of people who teach and coach, observers of the field say Mr. McBride is one of the few professors who continue to do both. Their numbers have been diminished by the increased professionalization of both jobs -- demands for top-notch scholarship from professors and competitive recruiting of athletes by coaches.
Many of those who continue to teach and coach are found at Division III institutions, where both the pressure on the sports teams and the expectations for a professor's research output tend to be lower. And most of the professor-coaches work in sports like tennis, soccer, and softball, not with higher-visibility sports like football and basketball. They do these jobs for a variety of reasons but mainly for the opportunity to work closely with students. Coaching, unlike classroom teaching, calls for close contact and intensive work as mentors. If they were only professors, these coaches say, they would never get to know their students half as well.
Mickey T.C. Wu, a professor of economics and head coach of the women's soccer team at Coe College, says he "gets an idea of what students are thinking" when he's out on the soccer field with his players in the fall. And, he says, coaching keeps him feeling young.
Mr. Wu started coaching the men's team in 1980 after his predecessor quit and he volunteered to replace him. "At the time, the chair of our department was an assistant football coach," says Mr. Wu, who played soccer himself as an undergraduate at Berea College. "I figured if he could do it, I could do it, too." He took a six-year break from coaching the men's team when his academic life grew too hectic, but he came back because he missed the sport.
In 1989, he helped found a varsity women's soccer team, after a female student who had played for the men's team told him there were enough women interested in playing soccer to start a team. By 1991, he had stopped coaching the men's team entirely and become one of two coaches for the women's team. This season he became the team's sole coach when his fellow coach stepped down.
Teaching and coaching, Mr. Wu says, have been challenging but he's been able to teach eight classes a year on average (the normal course load is seven) and work with students on their research. His own research has suffered, though, not necessarily because of soccer, he says, but because he spends so much time teaching.
Mr. Wu says he would not be able to coach and teach if his nine-member department didn't support him. During the season he leaves the office by 3 p.m. in time for his 3:30 p.m. practice. So if students drop by to ask him questions, his colleagues answer them instead.
They also watch him coach. "They want to see if I get thrown out of a game," Mr. Wu says jokingly, adding that they do come out for games to support the team.
Students, however, show their support in other ways. At the end of their economics exams they'll write "Coe Women's Soccer Rocks," Mr. Wu says, even though he tells them that won't earn them bonus points.
Mr. Wu and other professor-coaches aren't coaching for the money. Mr. Wu earns $8,000 each academic year for his job as soccer coach. Mr. McBride earns nothing; he lets his fellow head coach, Ramon Juarez, a local high-school teacher, have the $4,500 salary stipend that Whittier pays for the job. When Mr. McBride coached in 2000 and 2001 as the sole head coach, he gave back his salary to cover team expenses.
Mr. McBride began coaching at the college after a lifetime love of baseball and after hearing complaints that no one wanted to coach a women's softball team. So he and Robert F. Giomi, then Whittier's dean of students and now assistant dean of student affairs in the College of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, founded the women's softball team as a club sport in 1980. It became a varsity team two years later.
"I'm still doing the recruiting, letters, and interviewing," says Mr. McBride, who also works with three assistant coaches. "I'm still coaching, but in a game situation Ramon is the field manager and I'm the general manager." Mr. Juarez calls the plays so the players won't get confused, Mr. McBride says.
Besides coaching the team, Mr. McBride has a few professorial duties to fulfill: He teaches two political-science courses a semester, serves as chairman of his six-member department, and also advises a sorority and a fraternity. Mr. McBride, who is in his last year of directing Whittier's study-abroad program, is also an unpaid consultant to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and travels four times a year to New York and once a year to Geneva to work for the organization.
Mr. McBride says he has never wanted to seek a professorship anywhere but Whittier, but one professor who coaches a Division III sport says those who teach and coach would have trouble moving around in academe.
"It is very difficult to advance your career as an academic if you're a coach because coaching will debilitate your ability to consummate a proper scholarly agenda," says Jeffrey O. Segrave, the women's varsity tennis coach and a professor of exercise science at Skidmore College.
He, too, says he hasn't wanted to leave the college since he started teaching and coaching there in 1978. And he doesn't know how marketable he'd be, given his participation in both the academic and athletic worlds. On the other hand, with his reputation as an Olympic historian he says he may have "transcended" any possible stigma attached to a teacher-coach. "But for the next generation behind me, I don't think it's so easy to make that transcendence."
Mr. Segrave, who is serving as chairman of the department of exercise science, dance, and athletics this year and teaching two academic courses, doesn't get paid extra for coaching since it is part of his course load. Next year he'll teach four courses instead of two since he will have finished his five-year term as department chairman.
Although Mr. Segrave has kept up his scholarship -- editing three books, writing two book chapters, and publishing 50 articles in refereed journals over the course of his career -- he does miss some classes because of tennis matches and some practices because of academic conferences. And when the latter happens, "the players resent that to some extent," he says. "When I see other coaches, they spend an awful lot of time dealing with their sport in their community and region. That helps with recruiting as well. They'll do clinics, tournaments, and run summer programs on the campus."
Mr. Segrave, however, doesn't run the summer tennis camp at Skidmore, even though the players always ask him to. Summer is when he does his scholarship. "The connecting infrastructure between coaches and the program and the players, I can't offer it in the way I think I probably should," he says.
But he enjoys it too much to quit anytime soon. "I'll coach," he says, "until I can't stand the music the girls play in the van."
