We’ve been watching Young Sheldon since it came on the air. Sheldon’s dad in the show is a high school football coach, and the sole earner for the family. It appears that he is not a teacher, nor a school administrator.
The family doesn’t live extravagantly, but they seem middle class, owning their own home and having two vehicles. Everywhere I’ve lived, a high school football coach position was a part-time August-December position that pays perhaps $3,000-$8,000, certainly not a year-round full time job that apparently pays $40,000-$50,000, as on the show. Most often, as I’ve observed, football coaches are teachers or retirees who love the game and are looking for some extra money.
I realize that the show is set in Texas, and it’s fiction, but are there many people working as full-time HS football coaches, supporting their families?
Texas has several HS that have +60 million dollar stadiums. I expect that in those districts(and certainly others around the country) the football coach(es) are paid very well. Might even be a full-time position.
Every single football coach I had while in middle school and high school in Texas were either full time time teachers or some sort of administrator. Our head coach in middle school was a math teacher and the assistant coach was a gym teacher. In high school the head coach was an administrator of some kind and the other coaches were gym or other subjects.
I graduated from a tiny school in Delaware in the mid-90s. It was small, grades 7-12 in the same building and my graduating class was maybe 100. I don’t know how much he was paid but the high school football coach did nothing else except teach driver’s ed, which by this time almost no schools offered at all. And the potential class size for that was pretty small. So I always assumed that was some arrangement to keep him in an actual teaching job to get him a fulltime salary, I don’t know. The football coach certainly was the most important teacher to the community. I remember some minor outrage (probably just from team members and their parents) when it was revealed the varsity soccer coach (who had no other jobs) only made $1500 or so. But no one really cared if it wasn’t football. The best teacher I had was my AP Physics teacher but he was a lot more appreciated as an assistant coach. At other schools it seemed like the football coach always taught Health or PE. As important as football was, it wasn’t Texas. That could be a big difference.
Sheldon’s mother works or volunteers in the church, so she makes some money. And I’m assuming his father is also a gym teacher, even if that’s not shown.
Young Sheldon is set in the early 90’s at this point. Mary works for pay at the church.George’s truck certainly isn’t new, and the station wagon doesn’t look very new, either. Their house is a 3-bedroom tract house. Financial difficulties are often mentioned in the show. Sheldon has a full scholarship to college. Georgie works part time for the things he wants, including cable. They seem to be living just above the lifestyle of the other Coopers from that time period, in Roseanne.
If this article is to be believed, Texas high school football coaches make between $50k and $150k, with an average close to $100k. (Not surprisingly, it seems to be a function of the quality of the football program, although I don’t understand the ranking system). I guess I don’t know what other duties these coaches have.
In my high school, the football coach was also the wrestling coach and baseball coach. (The soccer coach was the track coach).
I went to high school in suburban Texas in the 80s. It was a minor scandal that the the new football coach at my high school was the highest paid teacher in the school (or the district). Minor, because most people didn’t care, as long as he could turn the team around. In the four years I was at the school, he did take the team from not having a winning season in 20 years or something, to having a winning season. I guess it was worth it?
I don’t know if the football coach had other duties, I never had him for any classes. I did have the baseball coach for PE. The baseball team won a state championship one year I was there, but nobody really cared, because it was just baseball.
It is completely reasonable that a high school football coach in Texas during the 80s/90s would be making enough to support a middle class lifestyle.
Same here. At my high school (a smallish Catholic school, 300 boys over four grades), we had a head coach (who coached both football and basketball), and two assistant coaches. All three of them taught classes at the school (as well as coaching multiple sports), and the head coach was also the assistant principal.
IIRC, they HAVE to be a teacher or administrator. My brother teaches and coaches at one of the very few private schools in Texas that compete in the UIL (the public school leagues), and when they transitioned from the private school leagues to the public school leagues, there were a whole lot of teachers that had to pick up coaching one sport or another, as the part-time coaches they had used for teams like the Freshman Soccer B Team were no longer allowed.
A lot of the time they’re funny-haha teachers in that they teach PE and/or Health, or if they teach an academic subject, it’s almost always Social Studies/History. But they’re still certified teachers and have to have all the education and whatever else that requires.
So it’s very probable that Sheldon’s dad is something like a PE teacher and football coach, where on paper, he’s paid to teach, with a small coaching stipend, but in practice he’s paid to coach and teaches a class out of necessity.
The highest paid coach on that list provided by Falchion is Hank Carter of Lake Travis High School, who makes north of $155K a year and also serves as Athletic Director. To give you an idea of why they make so much, prior to Carter and the previous head coach, his mentor Chad Morris (you might remember him as the head coach of Arkansas a few years back), the area was pretty sleepy. Football (good football) was one of the reasons for its incredible growth spurt.
Those of you who follow college football will remember the Mangino days at Kansas, where that normally horrid team actually made it to #2 in the polls and played in the Orange Bowl. Their QB was Todd Reesing, from Lake Travis High School.
If you follow NFL, you remember last year when Garrett Gilbert was Baker Mayfield’s backup for the Browns. They were BOTH graduates of Lake Travis High School. A large number of their skill players get division 1 scholarship offers. As for TX football in general, their main rival is Austin Westlake, former home of Drew Brees and Nick Foles, among others.
In Texas, football is king, and kingmakers get paid.
A while back, when one of the local high schools was trying to pass a referendum to issue bonds to build a new school, an anti-tax group distributed a list with the top paid teachers / administrators, their salaries, and their social security numbers (AFAIK, they didn’t get into any trouble for that, unfortunately). The text along with it was full of “OMG - the superintendent makes almost $200k!” (he made, I think, $150k) and “THE TOP 5 TEACHERS MAKE ALMOST 1 MILLION” (yeah, if you round up; they were all in the 100k-110k range). The top teacher salary was someone who had a doctorate, was head of his department, coached several sports, and did summer school. Yes, you add all of that up, and it gets high, but he’s putting in a lot more time than others.
BTW - my boss makes more than $150k. Who’s more important - the superintendent of a school, or a mid-level manager in a corporation?