My wrestling coach interview went really well. I made a good connection, the questions were easy to answer, I could tell the other coaches liked me and my background, and the head coach told me “you had a great interview.” But there’s no way I got the job. They interviewed three people: myself, a guy who’d coached youth wrestling in the area, and a teacher from the district. And they pretty much have to give the district staff priority. I was told this twice, once as I first walked in and once on my way out.

I get how the system works. The company I currently work for consults with a state-funded agency and occasionally a state job opens up that is completely earmarked for an already employed employee. Everyone knows this, so nobody else applies. The higher-ups can’t just interview one person though, so they go around trying to coax other employees, even if horribly under-qualified to put their name in so that they can show that they went through the process to fill the new job. So, the same here. In this case I’m not horribly under-qualified, but since they only had one district applicant they had to interview outside. I can have a phenomenal interview, but this one’s earmarked from the get-go.

I think it could work out okay though. As I was leaving the head coach gave me a very genuine invite to come up and roll around at practice any time even if the job doesn’t pull through. And this might be even better. No time commitments or constraints, just wrestling and drilling for the fun of helping some high schoolers get better.