Salary
Average Salary: $39,590
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $1,653,000
And what money would that be, pray tell? There's no money in coaching high school sports. In fact, your primary job will be to teach or drive a school bus or serve up slop in the cafeteria, and you'll coach on the side, because you can't live on the $2,000 stipend you'll earn teaching freshman girls how to kick the soccer ball into the net.
Those high school football coaches in Texas who make more than eighty grand a year? They're anomalies, and they only make as much as they do because they work in wealthy districts with extremely successful feeder football programs and parents who don't care if their kids end up concussed, so long as Junior gets his shot at Texas gridiron glory.
As for the salaries of college coaches, sure, Mike Krzyzewski makes more than nine million dollars a year at Duke, and Nick Saban makes more than five million dollars a year at 'Bama. But those forgotten souls who coach rowing…women's rowing…women's rowing at itsy-bitsy schools that can't afford to put up a football team? Those coaches don't make jack.
Actually, it's worse than that: Those who coach women's sports tend to earn less than those who coach men's sports, and pay for men's and women's coaches can differ significantly at the same school. For example, in 2012, the men's basketball coach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill earned more than $1.5 million, while the coach for the women's team only earned about $500,000 (source). Both coaches had led their respective teams to NCAA championship titles.
There are a slew of reasons why coaches for women's sports make less money than their colleagues who coach men, including:
- Men's team coaches are often assigned more schmoozing duties in their contracts than women's team coaches, and these additional duties are compensated with third-party funds, thus avoiding non-compliance with Title IX (see "The Odds of Hanging On")
- Men's team coaches use summer camps to make bank, while women's team coaches use summer camps to actually recruit athletes
- Because female student athletes are generally intelligent and motivated, women's team coaches don't have clauses in their contracts that reward them when their players do well in school. The contracts for men's team coaches often do carry these clauses, because male student athletes are morons and can't be trusted to even spell their names correctly.
But the biggest, super-secret-but-not-really reason men's and women's team coaches are paid differently is that men's sports programs (cough, football, cough) make universities a lot of money. A lot of money. And, so long as a school gives its men's and women's teams equal exposure, it's perfectly legal to pay the coach of the enormously popular football team far more money than the coach of the little-watched women's gymnastics team.
In other words, if you're interested in coaching women's sports, prepare to drive a Corolla while the coach of the men's team gets to drive a Bentley.