High school coaching pay topic a big talker at coaches event in Orlando

ORLANDO, Fla. – The momentum to pay high school sports coaches more has never been stronger than it is now.

The Florida Coaches Coalition has pushed for more reasonable coaching pay for three years and there have been small positives to think that help is on the way, possibly as soon as the 2026-27 budget year.

On Saturday at the group’s conference in Orlando, executive director Andrew Ramjit gave high school coaches an update on progress in the pursuit of pay increases.

The wheels of change are turning.

“I think over the last year the momentum has built up to a point that we’ve never seen in the state, and I feel very good that something’s going to be happening soon for coaches,” Ramjit said.

The Florida Coaches Coalition is pushing for minimum wage for all coaches in the state. The initiative is a massive undertaking when districts are hemorrhaging funding due to school choice and increasing charter school enrollment, but the mission continues.

Progress has been slow towards advancing coaching pay in Florida, a topic that forces dozens and dozens of men and women out of the profession or fleeing for other states annually.

“I think that’s at the end of day, it’s really just about fairness. I don’t think anybody does this to be expected to be paid exorbitant or unrealistically, but as the job description has changed over the years and a lot more things that were not expectations are now expectations and hours have increased,” said Jackson head coach Bobby Ramsay. “I do think it’s important that people are compensated for their time so they can justify spending the time doing what they do so that they can help take care of their families.”

Ramjit said the time for Tallahassee to act on raising supplements is now, and that GOP lawmakers have devoted more time and effort into listening and devising a plan to help. Rep. Adam Anderson is spearheading the mission to push for better wages for high school coaches.

“There’s much more realization in the state and I just think over the last few years, coaches speaking up, members of local community speaking up have really raised the issue to a point where legislators have to take notice and they have to take action,” Ramjit said.

News4JAX has tracked and detailed issues around high school coaching supplements since 2015. The supplement or stipend is the paycheck for an entire year of coaching. In football, the most time-consuming sport in high school, those range from a low end of $3,038 (Broward County) to a high of $8,317 (Charlotte County). Salaries in Georgia dwarf those at public schools in Florida, an issue News4JAX detailed in 2019. Coach supplements are collectively bargained for and included in union contracts and that means they vary significantly from county to county.

Only 17 counties pay coaches a spring football supplement, and just 23 counties pay coaches anything additional for reaching the state playoffs. Since the majority of coaches are teachers who work on 10-month contracts, there is no pay for the two months of work in the summer when weight rooms are open daily, coaching staffs are taking teams to summer camps, or players are on recruiting visits. That is all done for free.

Anderson told News4JAX last year that all options were being looked at to help high school coaches receive better pay. That included looking at revenue from the state’s betting and gaming industry.

“I think it’s just all the frustration of coaches leaving to go to Georgia to go to Texas,” Ramjit said. “Our profession in the state of Florida cannot survive if coaches keep leaving.”

Florida High School Athletic Association executive director Craig Damon spoke for an hour before Ramjit took the floor, giving coaches a sort of state of high school football entering 2025.

Among some of the topics Damon addressed:

• Coaching pay: “What our coaches do is the best dropout prevention program that any dollar amount that you can you can put on,” he said. “Definitely support trying to make sure to help our coaches get what they deserve.”

• The Raines-Miami Northwestern Class 4A state championship game set streaming records in the state. The Bulls’ 41-0 win had 21,000 streams on the NFHS Network, the most watched stream in state history.

• The 12th week of the football season is here to stay. Teams will now have two bye weeks, with the 12th week now baked in as a potential hurricane or weather week. The state had that for the first time in 2024 as three hurricanes disrupted play.

• One coach asked Damon about why the playoffs are not split by public and private, pointing out the major differences in between schools in those areas. Damon said that lawmakers feel like the differences between public and private aren’t as glaring as they once were due to open enrollment in Florida and the prevalence of school choice.

• Damon addressed the transfer topic, saying that he’s gotten complaints on his desk from schools about the rampant transferring in the state. He brought up one instance of an athlete playing on a team that lost in the first round of the playoffs, sat out the second week, and appeared on a different playoff team in the third round.

• The open division football playoff is still set to begin in 2026, but Damon said the topic still needs some work. The open division aims to put the state’s eight best teams in a separate playoff division to address issues of balance and prevent some of the behemoths like Chaminade-Madonna, Cocoa, Plantation American Heritage, Venice and St. Thomas Aquinas from barreling through the postseason annually. Damon said the formula for determining those final eight is still up in the air and could come from a MaxPreps/Freeman ranking blend or from a media or football advisory committee. The Freeman rankings are the MaxPreps variant that appear on the website. The rankings the FHSAA uses for rankings are a proprietary version.