Coaching stipends are notoriously difficult to standardize. This points-based system can help assure fair and well-reasoned compensation.

Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate. This could well be the athletic director’s rallying cry when they are working to secure part-time, temporary or seasonal coaches. At each of the schools I’ve worked at, I’ve found that coaching stipends in particular have been a challenge. That budget escalates faster than the full-time salary budget and is hard to estimate with “no cut” policies in place; that is, when teams shift in size and need more or fewer resources. On top of those factors, we are challenged to keep good coaches for the few dollars we commit to this important part of our school.

It’s a given that different schools will have different approaches to paying their employees, but in my long tenure in independent school finance, one question seems to be consistent over the years: “How do we determine and pay a fair stipend to our coaches?”

Recognizing that many independent schools, including those I’ve worked in, have not operated in a merit system (meaning there is a faculty pay scale based on experience), I created a scale for athletic stipends that calculated and estimated a fair wage for a specific job. The scale addressed the challenge of how to compensate the different coaching jobs, sports, teams and coaching positions.

With the support of the athletic director at St. Stephen's Episcopal School, I created a fair and transparent approach to paying our coaches based on a weighted matrix. Together we assessed each varsity sport based on a specific criteria and assigned a point value to each category (see link to full article).

Assigning points to the various criteria markers, we created a spreadsheet in which we list the sports, total the points and then sort the sports into three categories: heavy, medium and light.

We then assigned a stipend amount to different positions based on job descriptions and expectations as well as the sport-weighted matrix. These are some examples of coaching titles:

• Head Varsity Coach
• Assistant Varsity Coach or Head JV Coach
• Assistant JV Coach or Head Freshman Coach
• Head Coach for Middle School
• Assistant Coach for Middle School

In my experience, this stipend scale approach has been successful at schools that use a salary scale. If the culture at your school is to negotiate salaries the stipend scale’s transparency will likely prove less beneficial. The scale helped me avoid the swings in stipends from generous to cheap, thoughtful to random, equal to negotiated and everything in between. As “the great resignation” continues and our staff experience exhaustion from COVID protocols that change weekly, our coaches’ pay scales deserve and require careful attention. At our school, it gave our coaches the assurance that we value their work.

Credit: Net Assets Magazine

Author: Cindy Stadulis, NBOA Advisory Services