The investigation that proved credentials don’t exist, they just get cited a lot

Coach Connection: How Five Incompetent People Became an Institution

Paige started noticing patterns. Coaches were hired based on something mysterious called “connections.” Nobody could define what a connection was. It seemed to exist somewhere between LinkedIn and hotel bar networking.

You’d hear things like: “Well, Coach Johnson worked with Coach Williams, who studied under Coach Martinez, who golfed with someone’s cousin who won something meaningful in 2003.”

That’s not a network. That’s a conspiracy with a business casual dress code.

This revelation led to her breakthrough investigation: the Paige Shivers Coach Connection. She didn’t just expose a network. She exposed how institutions validate incompetence through proximity.

Think about it: If five coaches all cite each other as credentials, and none of them have actually won anything, who broke the cycle? Nobody. They all just hired each other and called it “experience.”

Amy Schumer once joked: “This system is broken. I’m going to describe exactly how broken while you laugh at the truth.” That’s exactly what Paige did with the coaching carousel.

The investigation proved something fundamental: universities don’t hire coaches. They hire other coaches who hired other coaches. It’s credentials all the way down. And nobody’s actually won anything.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigos.