Imagine, your job keeps adding hours, more demands, the parents of the people you are trying to help have become your biggest critics. Your boss, in some cases, sides with the critics, or more likely, just refuses to engage the fight, leaving you with no leverage, dwindling respect and your decisions are criticized and examined by media outlets that seem to pop up like mushrooms.
But at least you make a lot of money, right?
Nope, welcome to the world of a 2014 high school coach. It’s not for the faint of heart or resolve.
This had always kind of been an idea out there, every season keeps getting longer and longer, and the fall coaches especially have pointed out that hey, we do a lot more work, but we don’t get any more money.
I got a call from Dumont girls basketball coach Dave Cieplicki over the summer. Dave is now president of the teachers union in Dumont, and this issue was a real concern. I promised him I would look into it and get back to him. Dave was very gracious with his time.
Finding the numbers of what a coach makes really isn’t very hard. Almost every school board has made its meeting minutes public (it’s kind of funny though to see what districts are organized and what aren’t), so if you google “North Arlington and coaching stipend†stuff comes up kind of quickly.
I did research for a few hours, trying to compare schools of different sizes, and whether or not a fall coach made more than a winter coach or a spring coach (maybe a little). But what struck me more than anything, is really how little the coaches make, period. I didn’t name any names specifically in my story, but the one who really stuck out to me was Beth Powell, the volleyball coach at Demarest. I forget exactly what year I found, but it was maybe 2012, and the BOE meeting minutes listed her salary as just over $8,000.
Beth Powell is without question one of the best coaches in North Jersey, period, end of sentence. She has the championships and the credibility to back it up. She is the Greg Toal of North Jersey volleyball if you want to be honest about it. $8000….are you kidding me? What a bargain.
But listen, I also know that what the coaches get from their school districts is not the only thing they receive. Many run camps and clinics and make a pretty penny from doing so. That helps supplement their income. (Beth, for example, is also the boys volleyball coach at Don Bosco). Also, someone like Drew Gibbs, the football coach at Ramapo, gets a stipend as the “strength and conditioning coach†in the spring. That has to help.
Still, these coaches are woefully underpaid. What I found interesting though is that, there doesn’t seem to be any recourse for the coaches. What are they going to do, go on strike? Also, I wondered why this issue hasn’t been brought up before, you would think in the negotiations for new contracts, maybe it would come up, but as it was explained to me, teachers unions are more interested in raising the amount of the money they can apply to their pensions, stipends don’t really matter.
So why is this important? I think it’s important because we are at the tipping point of not having enough HS coaches to go around. Just look at the Coaching Openings list in the paper that we run, it always has new listings, and forget about head coaches, finding someone to be an assistant is even harder. Sure, there are volunteer coaches, but that’s hard too. They work for no pay a lot of the time, so how do you really hold them accountable?
I remember a story I worked on a couple of years ago when Pascack Valley Regional had to find a new gymnastics coach. They had no applicants. None. Not until I wrote a column on it did a few turn up. And as Paul Heenehan told me on the phone, coaches today can go work at a club program work less hours with less headaches and earn more money. To Paul, the days of long-time HS coaches, are over. After 8-10 years, a lot of people have had it. And finding new coaches is hard.
I had another email ask me to look into how the non-public schools structure their coaches pay, and I told him it was a great question, but those aren’t public institutions, so they don’t have to reveal how they work it. My guess though, and what I put in the paper is that most of the non-public school coaches receive a salary, but also get some perks like $$ from camps etc that they get to keep. Don’t laugh, that’s a lot of money.
It’ll be interesting to see if the NJSIAA ever steps up here. What Cieplicki kept saying was, if the NJSIAA keeps approving longer seasons, then maybe the NJSIAA should foot some of the bill.
(As an aside, the reason for longer seasons is actually pretty fascinating, involving football and non-public schools, but also, as I have said so many times, the New Jersey school calendar is hopelessly out-dated).
When I called and spoke to NJSIAA assistant director Jack DuBois, he pretty much laughed at that idea, saying coaches pay is not the organizations problem. And he’s right. He also pointed out that starting on August 11th or whatever was always considered “optional†and no school or team was mandated to have to do that. Of course, Cieplicki said, correctly, that no one wants anyone else to have a competitive advantage through more practice time, so if you can start August 11th, everyone will start.
The Big North also made a big move announcing a “dead period†for their athletes last summer. A 9-day non-contact period. And anyone who thought that this would hurt North Jersey athletics, um, well, Bosco is No. 1 in the nation right now, and so is the Northern Highlands girls soccer team. Gee, maybe if they took 2 weeks off, North Jersey would have a No. 1 team in boys soccer too.
I’m being silly there. The NJSIAA knows that it can’t possibly regulate what kids are playing what over the summer, and for who, that’s why during June, July and early August, it’s basically open season. But the idea of giving the kids a break over the summer is a good one (can I also point out that Bosco doesn’t have nearly the number of injuries in football that it had last season? Could a 9-day break be a factor?) I think the Big North might consider making it 2 weeks, and I think the NJIC would be smart to think about it too.
That would at least be something for the coaches too, a little break. All the coaches I talked to basically said the same thing, they aren’t in this for the money. They do this because they love the impact they can have on young people’s lives. I know you can’t really put a price on that, but man, what the coaches make today sure isn’t it.