Greg King wants the title of coach to mean something. 

The professor of sport management and former baseball coach for 27 years at Thomas College doesn’t just want “coach” to be automatically assigned to everyone in a room because they’re in a team or sports setting. He wants it to be taken seriously.

So King spoke with Thomas College President Dr. Jeannine Diddle Uzzi — who had previously shown interest in a coaching major — about expanding on the school’s current coaching minor. 

“I said, ‘We do have a coaching minor here and it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to try to put it into a coaching degree program,’” said King. “And so (Uzzi) just asked me to take a look at it, and I put something together.”

What King proposed was eventually greenlit, and will now be offered as a Bachelor of Science in Coaching at Thomas College. He will serve as the “champion of the program” when it’s rolled out this fall. 

“Just as any other profession, there’s good coaches and there’s bad coaches, but we all call them Coach, right?” King said. “So what I’m trying to do is turn this around, where anybody who goes through our program and they’re called Coach, people should know that they’ve got a really solid background to be good leaders, to deal with each individual athlete.”

Several institutions across the country have similar programs, such as West Virginia University, which offers a B.S. in Coaching and Performance Science, and the University of South Florida, which has a B.S. in Athletic Coaching and Physical Activity Leadership. 

Other Maine colleges only offer a minor in coaching (University of Maine at Presque Isle, University of New England) or majors in areas such as physical education, exercise science physical education and coaching (University of Maine, University of Southern Maine). 

That’s why Thomas College considers this new program the first of its kind in the state. 

“We’re looking at people that really want to get involved in coaching and turn this into a profession,” King said. “You think about sports and it’s like, ‘Is it a legitimate degree and everything?’ And yes, exactly, it really is. We’re trying to find those people in the program that really want to take coaching to the next level. They’d be more than qualified to be a youth coach, they’d be more than qualified to be a high school coach, but we’re really trying to get them to think bigger picture, Division I, Division II, Division III and even at the pro level.”

Students will take courses in coaching management, leadership and ethics, and sport psychology, to name a few. King said he hopes more electives will be incorporated in the future.  

“One of the things that we do very well  (at Thomas) is we take a look at our programs and we try to figure out what’s actually going on in the real world, and make sure that our program matches that,” King said. “So, on paper, it is what it is right now, but I certainly see some electives coming our way and other courses that’ll be added to the program.”

King envisions students enrolled in the program potentially combining the coaching major with other areas of study such as entrepreneurship, sport management or even digital marketing. That way, they’ll be able to incorporate other sides of the sports profession into their study amidst a backdrop of coaching. 

“They’re trying to find that fit where they’re combining other parts of a degree program, mixing in with the coaching part of it with the emphasis being on learning how to coach, learning how to lead, learning how to deal with mental health related issues,” King said. 

David Halligan coaches boys soccer and baseball at Falmouth and has more than 1,100 career victories. While attending the University of Maine in the early 1970s, he took some coaching classes, but nothing to the extent of what Thomas will offer. 

“I think (Thomas College’s program is) a much needed opportunity for coaches in the state of Maine,” Halligan said. “… The average length of a varsity coach in the state of Maine is three years or less in all sports. And sometimes it’s not the X’s and O’s, it’s some of the other things you have to deal with. And I think if they bring up some of those things in the curriculum, it would benefit especially younger coaches.”

Ed Flaherty, who coached the University of Southern Maine’s baseball team for almost 40 years, agreed with Halligan, stressing the importance of developing coaches. His only qualm, though, was where graduates will go following the completion of the program. 

“Maybe this is a good experiment, I guess you’d call it, to look into this, but you got to realize, what’s the value of the degree?” Flaherty said. “Where do you go from there? It’s one thing to get a degree in coaching, now what are you going to do with it?” 

King sees graduates working their way up through the ranks of coaching and organizations in Maine and across the country. 

Most importantly, though, is to develop graduates who better serving the profession he cares so much about. 

“I want to see (graduates) be the leaders of the future,” King said. “There’s a lot of great coaches that are out there, a lot of coaches are mentors, and I want our students to be able to take what they’ve learned in the classroom and pass that down to the people that played for them. The coaching profession is legitimate, but it’s keeping that going.”