The Boiling Frog: My Biggest Failure as an AD

The story of the boiling frog is a powerful one: drop a frog in boiling water, it jumps out; put it in lukewarm water and slowly turn up the heat, and it boils to death. It’s a classic metaphor for our inability to recognize and react to gradual, negative change. For a long time, this was just a story to me. Now, it’s the best metaphor for my biggest failure as an Activities and Athletic Director.

I recently wrote about how coaching searches I was a part of as a candidate went off the rails. I spent a lot of time reflecting on these stories – if they were fair to other ADs, what led me to make mistakes like this as a leader and what were the root causes. ADs have a lot on their plates and making mistakes is a part of the job. The thing I didn’t realize until I left the role was how much the environment we operate in shapes things.

Turning Up the Heat: Normalcy Broke Alignment

Education-based athletics is an important part of America’s athlete development model – even if it tries to be its own entity. It should be an intentional, interconnected culture that sets both athletes and coaches up for success. Unfortunately, too many of us fail to see the small shifts that begin to corrode our programs, failing to align our actions with our core mission.

When I first launched my school’s athletic program, alignment wasn’t an issue; every incremental success was celebrated and growing opportunities was the clear purpose. Coming out of COVID, our mission was clear: get kids back on the field safely. We were a lean organization, and every single decision was laser-focused on this one, non-negotiable goal. This singular purpose made every conversation easy. Everyone understood the “why” behind what we were doing.

But then, things went back to “normal.“ And with normalcy came the resurgence of disparate groups, each with their own priorities. The booster club wanted more fundraising opportunities and meetings. The coaches wanted more gear, travel opportunities, and levels. The administrators wanted more academic reporting, lower expenses, and wins. The singular, unifying goal was gone, replaced by a tangled web of competing interests.

I see this same problem across athletic departments at the middle, high school, and collegiate levels. Without a clear, unifying purpose, an athletic director’s job becomes next to impossible. It’s no longer about building a program; it’s about being a middleman, playing defense against competing demands. Time gets wasted on meetings where everyone is speaking a different language. People get angry and resentful because they misunderstand the purpose of decisions, feeling that their priorities are being ignored.

This is where the “boiling frog” comes in. The heat wasn’t a single, explosive event. It was a gradual rise in temperature from these competing priorities, each a small shift that added to the friction and fatigue. It became very clear to me that operating in that environment was increasingly difficult and, because I was in it, I didn’t have a straightforward way to bring everyone back into alignment.

Three Case Studies of a Misaligned Program

My failure was not in making a single wrong decision, but in not recognizing that our alignment had fractured. My team was slowly boiling in the chaos. These frictions are the primary cause of a misaligned program within the Education-based Athletics Model:

• The Mismatched Task: When Operational Drift Undermines Mission (Operational Misalignment) Education-based athletics requires every action to support student-athlete development. I allowed a well-meaning initiative to be created to solve a perceived problem, but it duplicated efforts already handled by a pre-existing part of the educational structure (the school foundation). This is a textbook example of operational drift: a new task that consumes time, energy, and resources without increasing net value. It signals a lack of trust in existing institutional partners and fragments the overall financial strategy.
  

When we launched athletics, there wasn’t an existing booster club established at our charter school. But, fundraising is an important part of charter schools in Minnesota because they lack community tax revenues that traditional public schools have. Operationally, charter schools function more like a private school. Most charter schools have a foundation. We had both a foundation and a PTO established – both with fundraising responsibilities. Neither of those organizations served athletics specifically so we created a Booster Club. The Boosters did and continue to do amazing things, but structurally, the time and energy used to create three different organizations that all fundraise is an amazing amount of redundancy for an organization that has limited resources.

• The Unclear Purpose: When Investment Fails to Serve the Student Experience (Strategic Misalignment) In the business of education, every facility investment must directly enhance the user experience—our student-athletes. We were so focused on solving the immediate, physical problem of “not enough gym space” that we lost sight of the holistic strategic purpose: making the entire athletic environment functional, safe, and efficient. We successfully built a structure, but we created a logistical nightmare that hampered the daily routines of the people who used it most. This proves that an investment that lacks full AD oversight and strategic alignment is simply an expensive, incomplete asset.

We were pushing 750 kids through our 6-basket main gym per day before practices after school. Phys Ed was a disaster and we couldn’t add lower level feeder teams for our varsity programs because there wasn’t practice time available. The Phys Ed department and the athletic department agreed that an auxiliary gym build needed to improve the locker room situation (there isn’t any space), the storage situation and ensure the spectator situation in the new space made sense. But in the design-build process, the AD wasn’t involved ensuring these goals were met. The school got another space, which alleviated some of the school day and practice pressures. But, it made the lack of secure locker room problems worse. It made traffic flow for Phys Ed classes and opposing team and spectators worse. Secure storage space was another (unfortunately common) oversight. 

• The Unprofessional Process: When Chaos Fractures the Educational Brand (Brand Misalignment) An educational institution’s brand promises organization, reliability, and competence. When a simple, vital tool like a shared calendar platform breaks down, it’s not just an administrative hiccup; it’s a tangible representation of a system that is disorganized and unreliable. The inability to execute basic coordination projects an image of chaos, eroding the trust of our coaches, parents, and the broader school community. This procedural failure damaged our educational brand more than any loss on the field.

One of the most common refrains we heard from parents when we solicited feedback was that the school couldn’t produce a centralized calendar. The rSchool platform was the standard calendar for the state’s school activities and athletics departments and the technology didn’t talk with our school’s own preferred website calendar. Now, this problem wasn’t unique to our school system, but it was a major problem that negatively impacted both the school and the student-athlete experience.

From Failure to a Better Way

The final wake-up call for me was when the school’s strategic planning process didn’t include any actionable direction for athletics. That’s when I finally saw where things were headed.

My team was no longer resilient; it was simply surviving the chaos of conflicting priorities. My failure was not a mistake of character or effort—it was a failure of clarity in a system that makes clarity almost impossible to maintain.

It’s easy to point fingers at the AD when things go off the rails, but the truth is that the problem isn’t the individual leader; it’s the environment of chronic misalignment. Public schools in Minnesota spend about 1.5% of their budgets on athletics. 98.5% of their energy is directed to 8 or 9 priorities that are more important. That fact isn’t a demonization of school boards or leaders – reading, writing, math, transportation and safety should be the priority for them.

ADs are thrust into the role of middleman, trying to juggle the demands of the booster club, the academic administration, the coaching staff, and the community—often without a clear, communicated mandate.

The essential, simple question that drove the temperature up for the “boiling frog” was this: What is our single, non-negotiable priority? Is it winning? Is it participation rate? Is it running a shoestring budget? Without that answer being established and communicated from the top down, every single decision—like adding a new system or building a gym—will fracture the program.

The core lesson of the boiling frog is the responsibility of a leader to be vigilant against creeping operational misalignment. It’s about having the tools and the clarity to assess the temperature of the water before the environment becomes unbearable.

Building Your Aligned Athletic Program with Polar

I learned this the hard way, but it’s a lesson that now defines my mission with Polar Athletic Group.

If you recognize the frictions in your program—the wasted time, the duplicated efforts, the facility investments that create more problems than they solve—you’re in a common, complex predicament. You’re simply operating within an environment designed for misalignment.

I founded Polar Athletic Group with the intent to give schools and athletic programs the strategic framework and unifying language needed to ensure a better experience for everyone involved in athletics. We don’t coach your teams; we partner with you to align your mission, operations, and brand, ensuring every action contributes to a strong school culture—one that is both resilient and structurally sound.

If you’re ready to stop being the middleman and start building a program defined by clarity and intentionality, let’s talk about how to realign your priorities and turn down the heat.

 

Driven by a Better Way, 

KB