SAFE
The modal worker here is a high school or youth-level coach, not a pro scout: the job is standing on a field or court demonstrating technique, correcting a 14-year-old's footwork in real time, managing a locker room, and deciding who plays. None of that digitizes — but the scouting half of this title is genuinely exposed, since video-tracking and predictive models already do much of the talent-identification and opponent-tendency work that scouts once produced by hand. Sign-off liability is thin (CPR/concussion certs, state coaching credentials, not professional licensure), so the moats are physical presence, athlete trust, and ownership of playing-time and safety calls.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $34,840 → $47,320 +8.7% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+6.4%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 248,950 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Hard to automate, and growing
The work resists current AI and the BLS projects +6.4% more of these jobs by 2034. Note that safe does not mean well paid — several of the fastest-growing resistant occupations are among the lowest paid on the register.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~41,800 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
CoachSki CoachGolf CoachSwim CoachTrack CoachBoxing CoachGolf TeacherHockey ScoutJudo TeacherRiding CoachSoccer CoachTennis CoachCollege CoachFitness CoachAthletic CoachAthletic ScoutBaseball CoachBaseball ScoutBoxing TrainerFootball CoachKarate TeacherLacrosse CoachRiding TeacherSki Instructor
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Running a two-hour practice — cueing a swimmer's turn mid-set, breaking up a locker-room conflict, adjusting a game plan at halftime after seeing the other team's press — has no digitizable substitute, and the 15 rather than 19 reflects that film breakdown, opponent tendency reports, practice-plan drafting, and stat-based lineup analysis are already routinely offloaded to software and scouting platforms.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments You are outdoors in heat and rain, throwing batting practice, holding blocking pads, spotting a gymnast on beam, and physically pulling a kid out of a drill before he gets hurt — the 17 rather than 20 only because meetings, film sessions, recruiting calls, and travel logistics take real hours off the field.
Certification preferred, not legally required CPR/AED, concussion protocol training, and a state coaching credential or NFHS certificate are the ceiling here; no board can revoke your right to coach, and when an injury lawsuit lands it names the district and the athletic director alongside you, which is why this sits at 5 and not in licensed-professional territory.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls You decide who starts, who gets cut, whether a concussed or cramping athlete returns to play, and how much load a growing 15-year-old can take — calls made in seconds with incomplete information and real physical consequences, scoring 14 because playing-time and safety decisions are yours to own even though return-to-play protocols and eligibility rules constrain the edges.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (15/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (5/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (17/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (14/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 36 of this occupation's 68 points (53%).
Embodiment (17/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 83/100, still SAFE.
Youth-sports liability insurers and national governing bodies (USA Football, US Club Soccer, USA Swimming post-SafeSport) conditioning coverage on a background-checked, certified named coach physically present per team — insurer riders excluding coverage for unsupervised app-directed training. Already partially in motion through SafeSport Act compliance requirements.
Genuine two-tier structure: if video-tracking and predictive models absorb the routine scouting tier (opponent tendency charts, first-pass talent screens — already standard via Hudl, Synergy, TrackMan), the surviving scout work is in-person character/makeup assessment, family and coach interviews, and signing-risk arbitration, which is the judgment tier. Composition shift raises resistance even with no new capability barrier.
State-level coach credentialing moving from a certificate to true licensure with a named, personally accountable 'coach of record' — the pattern already visible in state concussion return-to-play statutes (all 50 states have Lystedt-style laws) and in newer heat-illness and cardiac-emergency-action-plan mandates (e.g., Korey Stringer Institute-backed state rules) that require a named certified adult to authorize removal and clearance. If a state board adds registry-based discipline plus a requirement that the licensed coach countersign any AI-generated load/return-to-play recommendation, the shield goes from thin to real.
Litigation and settlements naming individual coaches (not just districts) for playing-time-after-symptom and heat-exposure decisions, making the documented judgment call personally attributable rather than institutional. Where districts adopt policies requiring the coach to sign the removal/clearance log, the role formally owns the ambiguous safety call.
Continued growth of paid private instruction and NIL/recruiting advisory where families pay specifically for a named human with placement track record — visible in the private skills-trainer and recruiting-consultant market. Any state regulation of paid recruiting advisors (bills of this type have been floated around NIL agent registration) would harden the human-specific premium.
The limit. Already 68 with near-max embodiment and trust; the only real headroom is liability_shield, and even full state licensure of coaches would leave the modal high-school coach cheap, part-time, and volunteer-adjacent — which caps how much any credential regime is actually enforced. The scouting half can keep eroding regardless of anything listed here.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 10,930 | $66,110 +40% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 10,850 | $47,450 +0% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 6,780 | $50,350 +6% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 5,630 | $49,640 +5% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 5,380 | $54,770 +16% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 4,840 | $56,220 +19% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 4,560 | $37,320 -21% |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 4,560 | $46,710 -1% |
| Corvallis, OR | 120 | $81,290 +72% |
| Trenton-Princeton, NJ | 350 | $74,620 +58% |
| Atlantic City-Hammonton, NJ | 90 | $74,000 +56% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 68. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.