JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – If hugs and handshakes and high fives paid the bills, Deran Wiley would have retired a millionaire after leading Raines to back-to-back high school football state championships.
The reality was far different for Wiley as it is for every other public school coach in Florida.
A year after that last title, Wiley left the game entirely. He is one of a growing number of high school coaches in Florida who have to look at the time they invest and against their limited financial return and answer the same internal question every year.
Is all of that still worth it?
The answer is somewhere between the extreme ends of the coaching and teaching profession — making a difference in the lives of young men and women while sacrificing from a personal and financial aspect that few know or care to know about.
Mandarin head football coach Toby Bullock says the quiet part out loud, echoing what coaches from the curve of the Panhandle to the tip of the Keys repeat year after year after year.
“I do not get paid enough to provide my family with what they need for the time I put in,” said Bullock, whose 7-3 district champion Mustangs played for a state championship last year.
Full-time football coaches in Florida don’t exist
Everyone could probably complain about their paycheck, but what professional would actually work — and be expected to work — for free?
There is no such thing as a full-time head football coaching position at a public school in the state of Florida. That is a myth.
The well-paid high school football head coach exists in places like Alabama and Georgia and Texas, something that News4JAX mapped out during a 2019 look at coaching salaries in Florida.
When coaches talk about better pay, they often mention Georgia, where supplements for position coaches on sub-varsity teams dwarf even the highest-paid public school head coaches here.
Florida coaches have historically bolted the Sunshine State for better teaching salaries and far richer coaching pay in the Peach State, much like Daytona Beach Mainland’s Travis Roland did after winning a state championship last season. Roland is now the head coach at Camden County.
“My son was a 26-year-old JV offensive line coach in Georgia,” said Fleming Island interim head coach Derek Chipoletti. “He made more than I ever did in coaching.”
They also mention Texas, which tends to be the state, along with Florida, that produces the most consistent top-shelf talent.
The Houston Chronicle did an in-depth breakdown of the top-20 highest-paying school districts in its area last November. The mean salary of the head football coach in that range was the No. 20 (the Klein ISD at $117,056.30) to No. 1 ($179,917.67 at Barbers Hill ISD). Three head coaches in the Houston area make more than Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
The top 25 paid head coaches in just the Houston area made no lower than Oak Ridge’s Mark Schmid ($127,918.26). According to the Chronicle’s data, the majority of those school districts have their head coach serve as the campus athletic director or some other non-teaching role. In the San Antonio area, 44 of the 64 head coaches there earn $100,000 or more between their teaching and coaching pay, according to a report from the San Antonio Express-News.
In Georgia, Carrollton High coach Joey King, Trevor Lawrence’s former high school coach, makes $225,006.89 as the state’s highest-paid coach. Rome’s John Reid is next at $185,645.47. Both King and Reid make more than Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and every other member of the state executive office.
What are supplements and how do they work?
Take what you’ve heard and read about high school coaches in states like Alabama, Georgia and Texas and compare it to here.
Of the state’s 67 counties, 64 of those pay head football coaches a supplement. The three counties that don’t — Bay, Okaloosa and Walton — pay their head football coaches on an administrative level and include more responsibilities than just coaching.
At public high schools in Florida, there is no such thing as a full-time head football coach, or head basketball or baseball coach. The men and women who are in those positions are usually teachers at those schools who take on coaching duties in addition to their full-time jobs. That means when games kick off on Friday night, coaches have already put in a day of work at their full-time teaching job.
The supplement or stipend is the paycheck for an entire year of coaching. Those range from a low end of $3,038 (Broward County) to a high of $8,317 (Charlotte County). Some counties bump up supplements for years of service, but most do not.
“It is definitely a 365 [day a year] job. That’s not just like coach speak or something you just throw out there,” said St. Augustine’s Brian Braddock, who has been voted as the area’s top coach by his peers in consecutive years. “It definitely is that. I can firmly say that is an accurate description to describe the job if you’re actually competing. It is 365.”
While there are outliers, most of the teaching contracts in Florida are 10-month contracts. Teachers work for 10 months and get the summer off. There are 11- and 12-month variations for coaches in some counties, but those are the exception and not the norm.
News4JAX has tracked coaching supplements since 2015, and 47 of those 64 counties have given head coaches a supplemental pay increase that has averaged $987. That’s a step, albeit a fraction of one. Locally, Union County has given the largest bump, going from $3,839 a year in 2015 to $6,318 now. That’s the third-largest increase in the state over the past decade.
Few counties pay for spring or playoffs
Each spring, high school football programs can conduct practice which allows 20 days of work. Teams typically conduct 19 practices and a season-ending spring game. Only 17 of the 64 counties pay coaches an additional supplement for spring football work. Several hold back percentages of the full supplement for spring, but the majority lump spring and fall into the same bucket.
If a team qualifies for the state playoffs, there should be a reward attached to that, right? Not always. Only 23 counties provide pay incentives for coaches whose teams reach the postseason, although that is an increase from 17 five years ago. Locally, Bradford, St. Johns and Union offer pay for the postseason.
That means when the state playoffs begin next week, more than half the coaching staffs in Florida will be working for free.
According to the National Education Association’s 2022-23 report, Florida ranked 50th at $53,098 in average teacher salary, down two spots from the 2021-22 salary data. If a coaching position can’t be filled with an employee at the school then adjunct coaches are hired for those roles.
Taking the state average for salary, one of the lowest in the nation, and then adding the state average for a head football coach in the 64 supplement-paying counties, the average pay for a head football coach in Florida is $58,070. Not terrible on the surface until considering that the coaching portion of that paycheck is less than $5,000.
A pulse for a change
In the Sunshine State, home to some of the bluest of the blue-chip athletes in the nation, high school coaches are some of the lowest-earners conceivable. It dovetails with poor teaching salaries here, something that the state legislature is trying to combat.
One statewide group, the Florida Coaches Coalition, started a grassroots effort three years ago to enact change for better wages. And for the first time after decades of stagnant pay in some counties, there’s at least a faint pulse that coaching salaries at the high school level could see a change. The Coaches Coalition is seeking to get coaches in every high school sport a $15 an hour pay rate that is both wildly overzealous and woefully inadequate in the same breath.
This isn’t to say high school head coaches don’t invite it upon themselves. There is no bait and switch. Every coach goes into a position knowing exactly what he or she will make as a teacher or a coach in Florida. Not one coach has ever told News4JAX in a survey or for a story over the years that they got into it for the money. Almost universally, they say the opposite. Current coaches often cite the impact of a coach or a teacher or a mentor at some point in their journey as to why they caught the bug themselves.
“You have to love the kids at this age level. For me personally, that’s why I still coach high school football,” said Nease coach Collin Drafts, 39, who has two young children. “I think this truly is the last beacon of hope for football from a purity standpoint. … We still get to build a team. At least I can still build a program and have kids at this age group.”
That joy and desire to make an impact has its limits.
Between open enrollment in Florida and now name, image and likeness, coaching is more complex today than it was even just five years ago. Coaches say that parents are more demanding, confrontational and out of touch than ever, largely because of what they see on social media. If one offensive lineman on a team receives a college scholarship offer, parents of the other four think it’s the staff’s fault their child doesn’t have one, too.
“People do not realize the work that high school football coaches put in,” said Fleming Island’s Chipoletti. “I would, quite frankly, invite all those people that are up in the stands complaining about what you call on third down to come out and give it a shot. They’d be doing laundry and a whole lot of things that people don’t know that we do.”
With NIL, it’s not inconceivable that a high school athlete can make a greater salary as a teenager playing sports than the men and women who coach it. And there are fewer of the longer-tenured coaches around who remain with their program.
Of the 47 public schools spanning the News4JAX 11-county region (Baker, Bradford, Clay, Columbia, Duval, Flagler, Nassau, Putnam, St. Johns, Suwannee and Union), only eight coaches have been at their school for longer than five years. (Beachside and Tocoi Creek are both newer schools in St. Johns County and haven’t yet been open for five years).
In 2019 when News4JAX last visited the coaching pay topic, 14 head coaches at the then 45 public schools had been at their program for more than five years.
“The side of it with sacrifice and personal struggle from the other side of the coin, it gets harder every year. That time with your kids is sand through an hourglass,” Braddock said. “I’d be lying as a high school football coach if I said that’s not something I am yearly weighing out, the sacrifice to my family. I’ve had great support ever since I’ve been here. I have a wife and kids who love it. If I didn’t have that and a great support system [administration, athletic director] right now, it would be a tough sell.”
‘Laundry doesn’t get done by itself’
Putting the headset on and patrolling the sideline on Friday night is the easiest three and a half hours of the week for Mandarin’s Bullock. He works his full-time teaching job in the day, then shifts into Coach Bullock that afternoon and into the evening.
Bullock and his staff handle everything conceivable, from working on getting players highlights sent out to college programs to game planning to dealing with parents and, even stacks of laundry. Yes, laundry. In reality, the Mandarin coaching staff, like others in Florida, will spend more time doing laundry than it will coaching games on Friday.
That’s one of the many duties that are delegated to the football coaching staff. At a school like Mandarin, that could mean in excess of 80 sets of jerseys, socks and pants, multiple times a week.
″Eleven cents an hour,” said Mandarin’s Bullock when asked for a ballpark of what his $4,699 annual supplement translates to.
“When you take in the offseason. What people don’t see is laundry doesn’t get done by itself. This is every coach at every high school unless they have other people that volunteer to do it.”
Bullock says that Mandarin is his dream job, and credits his wife, Becky, who supports his passion to the fullest. That situation isn’t unique to Bullock or even coaches in Duval County. It is at every public school district in Florida that pays a coach a supplement.
First Coast’s Marty Lee, the longest-tenured public school head coach in the area said the cycle has been spinning for decades.
“Don’t get me wrong, I have loved coaching and teaching and mentoring here in Duval County and making a difference,” he said. “But if I was a young coach now, I’m not going to lie to you, I would think twice about it [coaching in Florida]. There’s a reason why coaches are leaving. We’re losing a lot of great young coaches [to other states] and replacing them with who coaches who are not qualified to be leading.”
Midnight tweet starts something
Just after midnight on Dec. 28, 2021, Andrew Ramjit fired the opening salvo in what would eventually become the initiative to get high school coaches paid more. Ramjit’s post under the @PayFLCoaches account on social media site X laid the foundation on what would become the Florida Coaches Coalition.
The group has gained traction since that post and expanded to become a more well-structured organization with buy-in from college football coaches in Florida and Gov. Ron DeSantis, too. Its goal is simple. The group is asking legislators in Florida to pave the way for coaches in the state to make an hourly wage of $15. Regional director Jeff Gierke, the offensive coordinator at Jackson, said there is momentum building. Representative Adam Anderson, a Republican from Tarpon Springs, is drafting the legislation for it.
“This is our third year and we’ve made some headway with the legislation and with Gov. DeSantis to get Florida coaches paid $15 an hour for the hours we work,” Gierke said. “This is not just football, this is football, basketball, baseball, to bowling. Every coach. We are advocating for every coach to get $15 an hour.”
The trouble with that pay
Simple. Money. Lots and lots of it. In a time where students are leaving public schools by the thousands for private and charter education, public money follows those students out. With less public money going into school districts, counties like Broward, Duval, Hillsborough and Miami-Dade must combat the loss of those dollars somewhere.
The Florida Coaches Coalition says that head football coaches in Florida work 1,500 hours a year. That translates to a salary of $22,500 for one head varsity coach, and $11,250 for each assistant coach. Baseball, basketball, soccer, softball and volleyball head coaches are listed at 1,000 hours annually, meaning a $15,000 check.
“You’re not going to see that [type of raise] now,” Lee said. “You could see a small raise. Coaches are not trying to become millionaires, they just want to be compensated. I think [the push by the Coaches Coalition] at least opens up the dialogue.”
Why is any increase problematic?
Every district is different, but if all 11 assistant coaches at Mandarin earned the full $2,362 supplement that is offered and Bullock received his full $4,699 pay, their total pay would come out to $30,681. That’s the total salary due for 12 people for a year.
DOCUMENTS: Contracts spelling out supplements in all 67 Florida counties
In Duval County alone, that $15 an hour rate for just head football coaches at the 17 high school varsity programs would total $382,500. The varsity football coaching staff at Mandarin would earn $146,250 for a season of work. Consider the same scenario at the state’s largest public school district, Miami-Dade, which has more than three dozen high schools. That initiative climbs into the tens of millions of dollars just for varsity and junior varsity football staffs.
DCPS, the area’s largest school district, is facing a $1.4 billion shortfall. The School Board voted Monday night on its revised Master Facility Plan and the closure of six elementary schools that will be consolidated into six others.
The teaching component
Teaching salaries in Florida have been egregiously low for years but the wheel has slowly begun churning to try and remedy that. Last June, Gov. Ron DeSantis committed a salary funding increase of $1.25 billion for the 2024-25 budget to help boost teacher pay.
Locally, Flagler County has the highest average pay for teachers ($56,441.77) followed by Suwannee ($54,815.56), according to the Florida Department of Education’s latest salary data. Duval ($53,947.19), St. Johns ($53,199.99) and Nassau ($52,828.11) round out the top five among local districts. Statewide, however, that pay lags. St. Johns is consistently at or near the top of the state’s top school districts annually, but it ranks just 35th in average teacher salary. Head football coaches there get a $5,750 supplement, a number that ranks 20th in Florida.
Since there are 67 different districts with 67 very different budgets, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the issue. Teacher contracts are hammered out in collective bargaining with unions, and money for pay raises for coaches has to come from the same bucket where pay raises for teachers comes from. Rightfully so, the bulk of the money lands in the pockets of teachers, some of whom also happen to coach.
Shelton Crews, the executive director for the Florida Athletic Coaches Association, counts 354 schools in the membership of the professional organization. It provides, among other things, liability insurance coverage for members. It doesn’t have a spot at the bargaining table, something Crews is not in favor of anyway.
“We’ve had coaches try to get on the bargaining teams and got shut down because they were a coach,” he said. “I do not favor coaching supplements being in collective bargaining. Georgia has a statewide teacher [pay] scale and each superintendent can add to the scale in those places. Georgia does theirs by local option.”
Crews points to a local scenario in Levy County, which has three high schools. Several years ago, Crews said, the district was able to allocate pay for football coaches in the summer under a 10 plus 2 model. That’s a normal 10-month teaching contract plus two additional months for the summer. Last year, Williston was able to hire coaching legend Robby Pruitt, who had just wrapped up his career in Georgia.
“If you provide resources and make your job attractive, you find more quality people,” Crews said. “In Levy County, the superintendent was able to attract somebody like [Pruitt].”
Are the jobs still attractive as they were?
When Bartram Trail head football coach Darrell Sutherland stepped down after the 2022 season, it created one of the most attractive coaching positions at a public school in recent memory. The Bears were a perennial playoff team under Sutherland, who was hired in 1999, the year before Bartram opened.
Athletic director Ben Windle didn’t know what to expect when he posted the job. The resume of Cory Johns, who reached the playoffs in all six of his seasons at Nature Coast Tech, immediately popped out, and Bartram hired Johns.
Windle hadn’t gone through a football head coaching search before but said that he was surprised by the lack of applications. Sure, there could have been hesitation by applicants who didn’t want to have to follow a coaching legend like Sutherland, but a job at one of the best school districts in the state didn’t draw nearly the number of job seekers as one would think.
“I would say I probably had 15 to 20 applicants. Out of that, I had five with head coaching experience. I feel blessed to have the guy I have, but we didn’t have that [abundance] of applicants,” Windle said.
It isn’t just football.
When longtime softball coach Jen Harman left her job at Bartram Trail to take the athletic director position at Beachside, the vacancy drew three applicants. It was fewer than that for the Bartram girls lacrosse head coaching job after the Bears had to replace Megan Jackowiak in May 2023. Jackowiak was coming off back-to-back state championships and led the top public school team in Florida.
Mandarin athletic director Brian Rado said the applicant pool for a head football coaching position drew roughly 50 applicants, and then is halved for sports like basketball (25 to 30), baseball, softball and volleyball (10 to 12). Lee said that’s an issue schools face today.
“They see the listing [for the job], then you tell them you’re going to make this teaching salary and we’re going to pay you [less than] $5,000 a year to coach. And we’re not going to pay you in the summer, but you’ve got to be here every day,” he said.
Teaching vacancies are high
The teaching aspect could give a hint on the plight of schools to draw in a deep pool of coaching candidates.
The Florida Education Association reported on Aug. 15 that there were 5,007 instructional vacancies in the state. The Florida Department of Education highlighted a 13.3% drop in first-day-of-school teaching vacancies compared to data from 2023-24, but those two organizations painted different pictures. The FEA said that the state “pats themselves on the back” for funding corporate-run and strip mall schools while taking dollars away from public school teachers.
Instructional and support staff vacancies in all 11 News4JAX coverage counties decreased from 2023 to 2024, the lone exception being that of Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind. That school went from nine vacancies to 13.
“Education and coaching are one in the same,” said Drafts. “I don’t think we’re valued. Everybody wants to be valued and appreciated, and in the workplace, the one way to show that is pay. If we were valued, they would find a way to pay us more. We just wish the state of Florida would value what we were doing like the other states do.”
Responsibilities boom
In 2017, Florida became a state that allowed open enrollment, something that its touted frequently as school choice. Students could transfer anywhere provided there was a spot open at that school. That was essentially the transfer portal before the NCAA’s transfer portal. Earlier this year, the FHSAA voted to allow athletes here to profit from their name, image and likeness.
“If one good player gets a sponsorship for his name, image and likeness. He’ll get more money than coach,” said Mandarin’s Bullock. “It’s not too weird because I don’t think it’s as widespread as people think.”
The portal era in high school has been as wild as expected. It’s not unusual to see parents post on social media soliciting offers on where they should send their highly rated middle school athlete to, then watch the DMs arrive. Several in the local athletics community said when spoken to for this story that parents leverage their child’s future at that program now more than ever. It’s like a car buyer going from dealer to dealer to get the best offer.
Leaving and not looking back
Deran Wiley is one of the most successful high school football coaches in area history. The Raines alum led his alma mater to three state championship game appearances and won two of them, including the only back-to-back titles in Duval County Public Schools history in 2017-18.
After 11 years as the Vikings head coach, Wiley resigned in February 2020. He never had a losing season and was just two wins away from 100 in his career. Wiley left the teaching and coaching profession that year for a job in the private sector and hasn’t looked back.
Why would one of the most successful and ascending coaches in his profession leave while still at the peak? As much as the thrill and the puzzle of coaching still moved him, Wiley said that he knew things were never going to change from the peripheral side of things.
The financial and family sacrifice that coaches may overlook in the beginning when they’re trying to get a foot in the door becomes too much of a drain to ignore. Wiley coached in 23 playoff games, more than two additional seasons worth of games, and did it for free.
“It’s what your worth is. I mean, you ask yourself what’s going on, legacy, prestige, all that is dandy. I thank God for it, thank God for what he’s blessed me to do,” Wiley said. “But it becomes too enormous for you, as a man of your household, to keep up.”
Wiley got into coaching in 2000. In the 20 years in the profession, demands and expectations boomed. The 7-on-7 era arrived. Social media came into existence. Athletes frequented college campuses more. Exposure for teams and athletes became as mandatory as practice.
Everything increased but the paycheck.
Head football coaches in Duval County make the same thing now as they did in the mid-1990s — $4,699 for spring and fall football, no pay in the summer and not a cent extra for making the playoffs.
Wiley said the no playoff pay was tough but no pay for two months of work in the summer was crippling. For Wiley, assembling a staff and trying to convince men to come work for free was something that made the offseason the worst part of the year for him.
“Every summer for me was stressful. It’s a year-round job,” Wiley said. “I’m running on fumes trying to find money. It’s a major hurdle. Financially, it’s definitely a top three [reason why he left]. No way I can hide it, deny it, not tell the truth about it.”
Like Wiley, Chipoletti made the decision to leave education and enter the private sector after an 8-2 finish at Oakleaf in 2015. Clay County has the No. 2 salary supplement in the area (coaches there got a $17 raise in the last decade to $6,387 a year) but Chipoletti’s reason for stepping away from that career was simple.
“You know you’re not going to be rich. You know that when you get into it. But three kids later, you’re living in a three-bedroom condo driving 10-year-old cars, something had to give,” he said.
“Obviously the pay is what it is. Everybody in education is getting into it to change lives. But when the rubber meets the road and you’re working 80 hours a week and your wife wants to go out to dinner every so often and you’re struggling to establish a college plan [for your children], that’s the reality. You need the green stuff [money] to provide for your family.”
Chipoletti dabbled in coaching in the years since, including coming on as the defensive coordinator at Fleming Island last year. When Chad Parker abruptly resigned weeks before this season began, Chipoletti was asked to be the interim head coach for the season.
From purely a financial standpoint, Chipoletti said he’s lost money this fall by taking three to four hours off work each day to go coach.
The pendulum swings to the other side when asked why he decided to coach this year. It’s the reason why so many coaches struggle to walk away from the profession.
The kids.
“They’re the reason why I took the job this year. I don’t care if they grow up to be a line cook at Waffle House or an officer in the military or a pro football player,” Chipoletti said. “I’m trying to reach kids so they can be successful at all of those things.”
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