Like many organizers, the Maine Chess Association hasn’t been completely satisfied with online tournaments. Between cheating and other suspicious activities, it despaired. Unlike many organizations, MECA got very aggressive. For its K-5 and K-8 team championships, MECA had each team play in its own school and hire a TD to monitor them. I believe in each case the team used its own coach and had many of them become TDs for that express purpose.
In US OTB scholastic national team competitions, coaches are kept outside the tournament room and there are limited set of questions that they are allowed to answer and only in particular manner in the presence of official TD.
Here couch is promoted to TD and is being paid to watch his own team to compete in a fair manner. Coaches have incentives for thier teams to do well. There are multiple situations where this arrangement can go wrong.
This is strictly for national competitions, right? It would seem to be an easy matter to exclude coaches from being floor TDs in sections with their own team competing.
But the point is that for this competition in Maine each coach was overseeing his or her own team. This is a situation that is just asking to be abused.
I think the risk is lower than we think. Do we expect a coach, who is often a teacher, to risk their career at a school by cheating on a chess tournament? A teacher, who often needs to proctor exams? Yes, it could happen. But are the odds lower that a player cheats in a virtual tournament like this with or without the knowledge that their coach has the duty to monitor them? I suspect this alleviates more problems than it creates because a bad coach could have been a bad coach anyway - and that is made harder because a coach cheating must not do so in front of an entire team, rather than in a situation where individual students left alone could conspire one-to-one with a coach.