Full house; a nice hand in poker, an even nicer sight for a sports team in their home arena. Hamline hasn’t had many full houses recently, as poor play from the sports teams has almost become commonplace over the last decade plus.

How long has it been since the basketball team last filled the stands in a way that winning programs like St. Thomas and St. Johns do on a nightly basis? How long has it been since the football team was playing well enough to earn a full house on days other than homecoming? Volleyball? Baseball?

The point is, you could just about run your finger down the list of varsity sports offered at Hamline, and you’d almost certainly land on a team that hasn’t done much recently to inspire a fevered state of attendance from the student body. That, however, appears to be changing.

While they finished with just a 5-5 record, this season’s football team was one of the best Hamline has seen since the 1980s and 90s. The soccer teams were both on the verge of making the playoffs, and both have seen playoff action over the last two years. The men’s basketball team made the playoffs for the first time since the 2010-11 season. Both hockey teams made the playoffs in the same year for possibly the first time ever.

But this editorial is not about the success of this school’s teams, though that may be how it started. No, it’s about coaches. Several coaches, as a matter of fact.

Coaching changes in the last half-decade have seen the entire Piper athletic department revived. Cory Laylin’s three years at the helm of the men’s hockey team has seen the Pipers make the playoffs every season. Third-year coach Jim Hayes has the men’s basketball team in the playoffs for the first time in over half a decade. Natalie Darwitz has the women’s hockey team in the playoffs for just the third time in school history in her second year at the school. Jim Rubbelke, entering his sixth season at the head of the women’s softball program, had his 2015 team put up the best record in school history.

Success in this many programs at once is great to see at Hamline. What students should be worried about is whether these coaches will use their success at turning around downtrodden programs here at Hamline to catapult themselves into better job offers. It has been known to happen, and the success of programs at Hamline has to be catching the eyes of other universities looking to turn their own programs around.

It’s one thing to announce your retirement at the end of a long career and having your athletic director find a proper replacement that can fit with the players that are being recruited. It’s another to jump ship and run the second you have found success for a struggling program.

Recently, the women’s soccer team learned that their longtime head coach, Ted Zingman, would be leaving to take over the soccer program at Dickinson University in Carlisle, Penn. Zingman was the winningest coach in Hamline women’s soccer history, and he was the first coach to ever lead the Pipers to a winning season in women’s soccer.

The kind of talent he brought to leading the program will be tough to replace, but what is even more noticeable is that the very offseason after he managed to give the Pipers their best season in school history, he simply leaves to take another job. Now the program will have to continue through their offseason with the uncertainty of who might be taking over the program, and what kind of changes the new coach might implement.

Yes, coaches, it can be tough to stick it out at a college as small as Hamline. The pay likely isn’t that good, and there certainly isn’t much glory in grinding out a career as a coach for a DIII sport, even if Hamline plays in one of the most competitive conferences in the nation at this level. But leaving the way Zingman did, with little notice and even less knowledge as to who might succeed him, is not the way to go.

We, the students of Hamline University, are always desperate to see successful sports teams bring outside notice to our little slice of Saint Paul. Pride in the college we have chosen has been fleeting in recent years, but it finally seems as though the words ‘Hamline University’ aren’t followed rather quickly by the words ‘God we suck at sports.’ Coaches are a big reason this shift has occurred, now let’s find ways to convince them to stick around.