A Division I position coach handed a coordinator offer at a peer program mid-season, a term sheet requiring an immediate signature, a current contract with an ambiguous notice provision, and a head coach with a right to make the exit painful. We ran the wind-down clean.
His current agreement had a notice provision that was ambiguous on whether resignation mid-season triggered a buyout obligation and, if so, at what number. His current head coach had discretion under the athletic department's own employment framework to make an exit noisy.
The receiving program was ready to move. He needed the exit to be clean.
We read the current contract against the athletic-department framework and identified the exact notice mechanic that governed the exit. We ran a written scenario memo for the coach with the numbers on each path, then negotiated a defined-notice buyout at a number both sides could live with.
We ran the new contract in parallel: term, pay step-up, restrictive covenants scoped to a competitor set, and a defined retention bonus tied to on-field performance criteria we could actually measure.
We coordinated the announcement so the exit press release and the receiving program's announcement hit the same day, cleaned up the recruiting-file transition against NCAA rules, and closed the current program's file with a written release. He was on the practice field at the new program inside five days.
"A messy exit would have followed me for years. Brandon made sure it did not."
— Position Coach, Division I
Coaching is a small industry with a long memory. A head coach with discretion to make an exit painful, an ambiguous buyout number left unresolved, a recruiting file transferred sloppily, any one of these can create a reputation problem that outlasts the career move itself. A seventy-two-hour signing clock leaves no room to sort it out after the fact.
Reading the exact notice mechanic before anyone else does is what turns an ambiguous clause into a negotiated number instead of a dispute. The new contract has to be ready to sign the same day the old one closes, or the window closes on the opportunity instead.
We handle coaching contract exits and entries on compressed timelines, and we run both contracts in parallel so a career step-up does not turn into a messy departure.
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