JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is in favor of paying high school football coaches in the state more.
DeSantis made the remarks this week at Jacksonville Classical Academy, telling Florida Politics that he sees coaches in other states making quite a bit more.
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“I don’t want to say that money is everything, but I think you can make more money being like a high school football coach in Georgia because parents can do boosters and stuff,” DeSantis said. “And look, I know there’s got to be guardrails on that, but I want it to be attractive to coach.”
News4JAX detailed the miserable coaching pay during a 2019 pay of head coaches in the Sunshine State. In charting coach salaries over the past 10 years, 40 of 64 counties here have given head coaches pay raises in that span. Those range from as little as $40 to as much as $3,500. The highest football head coaching supplement in the state is $8,317 in Charlotte County.
Two other counties, Bay and Walton, pay head football coaches as administrators and not on a supplemental salary schedule.
But those supplements are woefully low. Duval County, for instance, pays head football coaches $4,699 for a full year of coaching. That includes no pay for things like summer workouts. Those coaches haven’t had a pay increase in more than 25 years.
Just north in the Peach State, coaches can make 10 times more than coaches here. Dozens of coaches in Florida leave annually for Georgia to earn more both teaching and coaching.
A group called Florida Coaches Coalition is seeking to boost head coaching pay in the state to actual minimum wage, $15 an hour. That would mean $22,500 for head coaches and $11,250 for assistant coaches, numbers that would need to have funding from somewhere. In Duval County alone, that would mean paying the 17 varsity head football coaches a total of $382,5000, up from the $79,883 that they currently earn.