THE ROSTER
There is no shortage of leadership content for coaches. There is a shortage of leadership content that was built for coaches.
Most of what exists was adapted from corporate training, repackaged for an athletic context, and delivered by someone who has never stood on a sideline. Coachology exists because that gap has a cost — and that cost shows up in every program that runs on a personality instead of a system.
WHY COACHOLOGY EXISTS
The best coaches in this profession were never taught how to lead a staff. That is not an accident. It is a gap — and it has been there a long time.
Coaching education develops football coaches. Clinics develop scheme. Experience develops intuition. None of it develops the leadership infrastructure a head coach actually needs to run a program; the ability to cast a vision his staff can execute without him, to delegate without losing control, to have the hard conversations his program requires, to develop coaches instead of managing them, and to build systems that outlast any single season or any single personality.
That infrastructure has to come from somewhere. For most head coaches, it comes from trial and error; seasons of figuring out what nobody taught them, at the expense of the programs and the people in their care.
Coachology was built to close that gap. Not with motivation. Not with generic leadership principles borrowed from the corporate world. With a structured, research-grounded curriculum built from inside the coaching profession; designed to install the leadership layer every head coach needs and almost none were ever given.
THE FOUNDER
Dr. Alex Wanstrath has spent his career at the intersection of two things most people treat as separate: the science of how people learn and the craft of coaching football.
Dr. Wanstrath has been coaching football for fifteen years — including work as a Division I FBS graduate assistant and as a defensive coordinator on an OHSAA state championship staff. Although no longer working in the schools, he remains a volunteer coach with an OHSAA Division II program. He is an active member of OHSFCA, and he coaches because he loves it, not because it is a credential.
Alex holds his doctorate in Instructional Design and Technology — the field that studies how adults actually learn, retain, and transfer new skills. He also holds his maters in Coaching Education and a bachelors in Education. His 10 years in the classroom and 5 years in corporate Learning and Development have given him the opportunity to build skills, gain experience, and identify the gap in coaching that allows Coachology to work differently than anything else coaches have access to.
Dr. Wanstrath has spent the last five years building and delivering training programs for professionals across industries. He watched the same pattern repeat: organizations bringing in leadership content that was well-produced, well-intentioned, and functionally useless — because it was designed to inform rather than install. People left with notes they never used.
He also watched the same pattern in coaching. Coaches attending clinics, buying books, listening to speakers — and returning to the building with nothing that transferred into how they actually led their staff. Great ideas and stories, lacking in frameworks, application, and long-term success.
Coachology was built because content designed without the science of how adults actually change their approach and mindset in leadership. Coachology is built for coaches, backed by learning science, and launched with the goal of supporting those who are growing our players, staffs, and next generation of leaders.
THE CREDENTIALs
The sideline credential comes first. Not because the academic credential doesn't matter — but because credibility in this profession is earned on the field before it is earned anywhere
Dr. Wanstrath is a football coach who also holds a PhD — not a PhD holder who also coaches football. That distinction matters to every skeptical head coach who has sat through a leadership seminar delivered by someone who has never managed a locker room, never had to replace a coach mid-season, never had to make a personnel decision with a parent on one side and a player on the other.
The coaching credential — fifteen years, multiple levels, a state championship — is the reason Coachology speaks the right language. The scenarios are real because they happened. The frameworks were built because the problems are real. The voice is coach-to-coach because that is what it is.
The PhD in Instructional Design and Technology is the reason the content transfers when clinic content doesn't. Every module is built on Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle — the research-grounded model that describes how adults actually move from exposure to a new idea to genuine cognitive change. Coaches in a Coachology session do not sit and receive. They engage, reflect, and build — because that is how adults learn, and because the research on this has been settled for decades.
The Master's degree in Coaching Education bridges the two. It is the credential that sits at the intersection of what coaches need to know and how they need to learn it — and it is the foundation on which every Coachology framework was designed.
The full credential story:
PhD — Instructional Design and Technology
Master's — Coaching Education
Bachelor's — AYA Social Studies Education
15 years football coaching — D1 FBS, varsity coordinator, state championship defensive coordinator, coached 39 all-conference players (Over 10 years for HS), and 1 DPOY
5 years corporate Learning and Development
Active member — OHSFCA
Current volunteer football coach, OHSAA Div. II Program
THE ORGANIZATION
Coachology is not a speaking business. It is not a clinic. It is a leadership development organization built on science-backed curriculum.
Coachology is a single-owner LLC founded and operated by Dr. Alex Wanstrath. It is built on the belief that leadership development for coaches should meet the same standard as any other serious professional development — structured, research-grounded, sequenced deliberately, and designed to produce cognitive change rather than momentary inspiration.
Every engagement is built on that standard. Every framework is named, defined, and installable. Every session produces something the program uses after the room clears. Every tier — from a ninety-minute Spark Session to a year-long retainer — is designed to move a program forward in a specific, measurable direction.
Coachology is currently building its client base in the Cincinnati metro area and surrounding region, with a focus on high school football programs and athletic departments. It is early. The client list is intentionally small. Every program that engages now gets direct access to the founder — not a scaled version of the content, but the curriculum delivered by the person who built it.
Coachology is not a franchise. It is not a platform with a roster of facilitators. Every Coachology engagement is led by Dr. Wanstrath directly — which means the coach in the room is getting the curriculum from the person who built it, with fifteen years of sideline experience behind every framework and a PhD in how adults learn behind every design decision.
What Coachology is not
A few things worth saying directly.
Coachology is not a motivational product. There are no keynote speeches, no energy-in-the-room moments designed to spike emotion without installing anything. A coach who wants to feel fired up for a week has better options.
Coachology is not a coaching clinic. There is no scheme content, no X's and O's, no recruiting strategy. The product is leadership — specifically the leadership infrastructure that makes everything else a head coach does more effective.
Coachology is not corporate leadership training adapted for athletics. The scenarios are not borrowed from business contexts and reframed with football language. The frameworks were built inside the profession because the problems they address are specific to it.
Coachology is not for every coach. It is for head coaches — and the coordinators and assistants those head coaches are developing — who are serious about building a program that runs as a system instead of running on a personality. If that is not the problem you are trying to solve, this is not the right resource.
not sure if you’re ready to take the next step?
If you want to know more before reaching out, start with the curriculum.
The Install walks through every framework in the Complete Coach Leadership Series and the Coachology Gameplan — what each module addresses, what it installs, and the question it leaves your program with. If something on that page sounds like your program, then contact us to get started.