I understand that this season, staff turnover is especially prominent — increasing at the high school, college, and professional levels — yet it is an issue that seems like it’s “just the way it is right now”.

After working with hundreds of you to build Superhera and understanding the impact you've had on me as an athlete, I wanted to share how I feel about it.

Equipment managers who have been with a program for a decade, facility operations staff who knew every athlete by name and by fit, and athletic directors who carried years of institutional knowledge in their heads are leaving.

But the crucial part I want to talk about today is the impact "musical chairs" has on your ability to impact the athlete experience.

Someone new takes up the role and all its responsibilities, inherits the roster, and is expected to perform at the same level on day one with none of the context that took years to build.

Last week I asked what a win looks and feels like in your role:

That number tells me that programs want to be very forward-looking and are thinking about continuity year after year. We use this feedback to make sure the tool we’re building will get you out of the day-to-day slog, and give you more time back to increase impact where it matters most

Athletic Director U just released Part 2 of their D1 Administrative Burnout study, qualitative analysis from 2025, and the numbers are extremely telling and genuinely uncomfortable.

Exhaustion and disengagement scores among D1 administrators are in the high-risk range. Overall, burnout is moderate, approaching high-risk. The drivers have shifted entirely since 2022. This is no longer a COVID hangover. The pressure now comes from NIL complexity, the transfer portal, conference realignment, and revenue sharing, which means a fundamentally different business running on the same staffing models that existed before any of it arrived.

Additionally, compensation has not kept pace, and entire staffs have gone five years without a raise.

"I am overworked and undervalued. I don't feel appreciated."
— Power 4 assistant AD

"Coaches have expectations rising as we have fewer resources."
— Communications staffer

"I grew tired of a business model that underpays critical frontline workers."
— 30-year veteran who left the industry

All of these are incredibly disheartening to read because even with thirty years of institutional knowledge, individuals aren’t being valued as the asset that they truly are.

When we talk about athlete experience, we tend to talk about the visible layer, including facilities, NIL, travel, and gear.

Yet there’s a missing part of institutional memory embedded in the minds of the familiar faces that the entire team knows.

The equipment manager who knows which athlete prefers oversized practice tees. The ops staffer who remembers that one freshman has a sensory issue with certain fabrics. The person who quietly flagged last year that the warm-up order came in wrong and fixed it before anyone noticed.

That knowledge does not live in a system, but it lives in a person. As I mentioned two weeks ago, systems and technology are great when they can learn from a knowledgeable human with real experiences, but when that person leaves, essential knowledge leaves with them.

I saw this when I met with an ACC Football Team who had built a special relationship with their Equipment Managers and relied on their Equipment Team to know what these athletes felt best in.

Athletes can feel this, but they’re taught to adjust and move on.

Superhera was built on a simple premise: sizing intelligence is really fit memory.

It is the knowledge of how each athlete fits, their measurements, their preferences, how they run across brands and product types, held in a system instead of a person, decoupled from whoever happens to be in the equipment room this season.

When the staff turns over, the fit data does not, and neither does the order history. The athlete's preferences surely don’t, and the new equipment manager walks in with the institutional memory already there waiting.

If you are navigating staff turnover and want to see how other programs are protecting athlete experience through it, reach out to me directly.

The musical chairs are not slowing down this season, and compensation is not fixing itself. The structural pressures driving good people out of athletic administration are impacting all corners of the field.

What programs can control right now is building systems that hold the knowledge, so that when the chairs stop moving, athletes are not the ones left standing without what they need.

That is the work that can be done right now.

✍ Sign up to have your team fitted! We work with programs to build fit systems around real bodies, real movement, and real sport demands.

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