OPERATING MODEL REDESIGN
Principal as operating hub
Scheduling, compliance, transportation, staffing, concessions, paperwork, communication and issue resolution converged on one role.
→
Distributed operating model
Administrative workflows, event support and day-to-day coordination were distributed across front-office staff, district support and a dedicated Athletic Director—with principal oversight retained where needed.
The challenge
As my leadership scope expanded from one campus to two, the existing athletics model stopped being sustainable. The principal role carried responsibility for coach hiring, student eligibility and required documentation, transportation coordination, home-event staffing, concessions, game operations, financial paperwork, parent communication and issue resolution. The work was not inherently impossible; the problem was that too much of it depended on one person.
Compliance
Physicals, required trainings, participation documentation and related follow-up.
Event operations
Workers, officials, facilities, concessions and home-game coordination.
Logistics
Transportation, schedule changes, purchasing and administrative paperwork.
Stakeholders
Coaches, families, staff, district athletics and cross-campus communication.
Decompose the work before delegating it
I did not start by simply handing tasks to other people. I first looked for repeatable administrative work that could be separated from decisions requiring principal authority. I benchmarked how a colleague at another campus had reduced the same burden, then arranged a virtual working session between his front-office staff and mine so the people who would actually execute the work could learn the process directly.
The goal was not to delegate responsibility away. It was to stop using principal time as the default processing system for work that could be executed elsewhere.
Build front-office capability
During the transition, bookkeepers took on substantial portions of the administrative workflow: tracking required student documentation and trainings, processing operational paperwork, coordinating game workers and concessions, ordering supplies and helping manage schedule changes. I retained budget oversight and provided the information or approvals they needed, but the process no longer required me to personally touch every transaction.
Principal
Budget oversight, escalations, hiring decisions, policy alignment and decisions requiring administrative authority.
Front office
Repeatable tracking, submissions, worker coordination, concessions support, purchasing workflow and administrative follow-through.
District support
Centralized portions of the high-school extracurricular process after campus leaders raised the workload issue upstream.
Improve the system upstream
Delegation solved only part of the problem. I also raised the broader workload issue with district athletics leadership and asked whether pieces of the process could be handled centrally. That feedback contributed to high-school extracurricular processing moving out of the campus principal workflow, reducing duplicated administrative work at the site level. Later, campuses were given the opportunity to establish paid Athletic Director roles, creating a more sustainable ownership structure.
Standardize the operating rules
The operational redesign also exposed another source of friction: each coach had historically operated from an individual team contract, creating different expectations across sports and making enforcement unnecessarily complicated. I brought coaches together to create a unified athletics agreement that could be supported consistently by coaches and administration.
One framework
Common expectations replaced separate coach-by-coach rules.
Shared enforcement
Coaches and administration could point families to the same agreed expectations.
Visible changes
Updates were explained when the agreement changed between seasons.
Reusable system
After targeted revisions, the agreement stabilized into a durable year-to-year operating tool.
Launch
Implemented the unified agreement and held to the shared expectations through the season.
Inspect + adapt
Made a targeted revision based on issues surfaced during implementation, then communicated the change before the next season.
Stabilize
Made one additional refinement and carried the mature agreement forward as the standard operating framework.
Transition to dedicated ownership
When a paid Athletic Director position became available, I transitioned the operational model again rather than keeping myself at the center of it. The new AD and I aligned on the department vision and expectations, jointly interviewed coaches, led coach and parent meetings, and established how the AD would work with the bookkeepers. Day-to-day athletics execution could then sit with a dedicated role while I retained appropriate leadership oversight.
What this demonstrates
Scaling leadership is not about personally absorbing every new responsibility. It requires identifying where work belongs, building the capability to execute it, standardizing the rules that govern it, advocating for structural fixes when local delegation is not enough, and then continuing to evolve ownership as better options become available.
A scalable operating model reduces dependency on individual heroics. Clear ownership, capable people, shared standards and intentional handoffs make the work sustainable.