Could revenue from sports betting in Florida help bridge the gap in high school coaching pay?

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The push to get high school coaches in Florida more supplemental pay will pick up in the coming months and the legislator heading it up sees a real possibility of change in the coming years.

Rep. Adam Anderson, a Republican who represents District 57 in Pinellas County, has spoken to the Florida Coaches Coalition and college coaches in the state on what can be done about an issue that sends good coaches out of the state or out of coaching entirely every year.

“Had some early conversations with the Governor’s office on it,” Anderson said. “All I can say definitively from those conversations is there is an understanding in their office [of the issue] and there is a motivation to do something. What that is, we’re not there yet. This session, we’ll start fleshing this out through committee. I would say we could have impactful conversations [in committee].”

The state legislative session starts March 4, 2025, and ends on May 2.

The Coaches Coalition, started by Andrew Ramjit in December 2021, has said that coaches deserve a minimum wage of $15, which will be the state minimum wage on Sept. 30, 2026. Based on the number of hours, that means head varsity football coaches would earn $22,500 a year, almost triple of what the state’s highest supplement ($8,317 in Charlotte County) is now. That’s a Mount Everest-sized ask right now in a state with no income tax and a desire for better teacher pay.

But Anderson said he thinks there is room for improvement. The details are still in the exploratory stages but revenue from sports betting, which has been legal in Florida for roughly a year, could be an avenue for the state to tap as it tries to bridge the massive divide between high school coaches here and those in other states.

“If we carved out a percentage from revenue in a certain area and it’s earmarked specifically for coaching pay … revenue we get from sports betting,” he said. “It’s a new stream of revenue we have in the state. What if we took some of that money? We haven’t gotten that far. I haven’t looked into where that’s going. The money’s there if we can get across that legislatively.”

Currently, supplements are collectively bargained by unions and fall lower down on the negotiation ladder. Anderson said the ideal setup would be salary increases determined at the district level for coaches. For instance, if St. Johns County, which is annually the No. 1 or near the top of school districts in the state, sought to be the leader in coaching pay, it should be able to access additional state funds and be able to do that. St. Johns currently pays head football coaches $5,750 a year, a total that ranks 20th in Florida.

“Provided the resources are there are for the school board, if we want this we have to make sure the resources are there, but the school should have the autonomy to say, ‘if we want to double or triple what we pay the basketball coach, we can,’” he 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. 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.

In Florida, 64 of the 67 counties pay coaches a supplement for their work. Since 2015, 47 of those 64 counties have given head coaches a supplemental pay increase that has averaged $987. Most coaches, especially on the football side, are full-time teachers who work on 10-month contracts and don’t get paid for their work in the summer.

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.

“One of the hurdles you just pointed out, an obstacle, is our teacher pay is still low, relatively speaking,” Anderson said.

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.

“It is an area I want to see the needle moving on, certainly,” Anderson said. “It’s taking an incremental step to move the needle in the right direction. It’s very, very possible [to see a supplemental raise happening].”

Anderson said that when he spoke with Florida State head coach Mike Norvell about the issue of coaching pay in high school, Norvell’s message left a mark that stuck. It’s why Anderson has become so passionate about the coaching topic in the last few months as he’s gotten up to speed on the issue.

“[Norvell] said when he was talking about recruiting, Florida has the best raw talent of any state I can recruit football players, but it’s easier and better to recruit from Georgia,” Anderson said. “Those players might have a similar talent, but they’re more refined athletes and it’s a function of the coaching. They’re not necessarily better athletes but there are less other issues that they have to deal with. That really struck a chord when I heard him say that. I don’t want our athletes going out of Florida.”