What can you buy for $6,600?
In 1976, Jim Hamilton thought he was doing quite well making nearly $7,000 as a teacher and as a coach at New Hope High School. After graduating from Ole Miss, he chose teaching over a career in physical therapy and quickly discovered there was a lot more to teaching and coaching than he expected.
“Nobody I know of who is in this profession does it for the money,” Hamilton said. “I am talking about superintendents, whomever. They don’t do it for the money. I feel like it is a calling. You are placed here to do this. It is not for everybody. My wife (Gwen) will tell you that. She is in the medical profession and is as good with children as they come. She works with them at our church all of the time. She will come home after an hour of working with some of the younger children on Sunday nights and say, ‘I don’t know how you do it all day, every day.’ ”
Hamilton is one of a handful of teachers and coaches in the Greater Golden Triangle area who has lasted nearly 40 years. Currently, he is retired, but he still is working as a teacher at the Columbus Municipal School District’s alternative school and is an assistant football coach at Columbus High. The Dispatch spent the past few weeks talking to area coaches/teachers about their thoughts about the work they do. For football coaches, games are only the end result of a week’s worth of hard work. Many of those coaches are teachers, too, who have to make up lesson plans, grade homework assignments, fill out paperwork, handle discipline, and, after the day is done, go home to their families.
If that sounds like a full plate, consider Hamilton has been working in the field for nearly 40 years, so he has seen plenty of changes and plenty more educators come and go.
“It is better now in that it’s somewhat competitive,” Hamilton said. “But take (Columbus High football) coach (Randal) Montgomery. He is a 35-year-old with a master’s degree. If you take away the coaching end of it and what he makes as a teacher with 10 years experience, he is in pretty good shape on the ladder, but he is still nowhere compared to where he would be in the professional world. That is the thing that still aggravates me to this day.”
Hamilton said he still hears people tell him, “You only work nine months a year,” and “You get off at 3:30 p.m. every day.” He smiles and tells them days for coaches don’t end at 3:30 p.m. They typically last into the early evening, if not later if their are middle school, freshman, or junior varsity games to attend.
If you factor in all of those hours, as well as time spent doing maintenance on the field or facilities, washing clothes, keeping track of players’ grades, studying film, and preparing game plans on the weekends, the time spent during the season stretches the amount of money all coaches make.
“Without getting into my salary as a coach, I figured my hours the other day as to what we are averaging right now, just coaching, and I am not counting the summer,” Hamilton said. “I make about $13 an hour, and if that is just if we go through the regular season. It ends up being 14 weeks and pretty much seven days a week. I backed off and figured four hours a day.”
Hamilton acknowledges four hours a day is a “light” schedule and doesn’t take into consideration work he does at home or travel to and from games. With all of that said, Hamilton maintains things are better today compared to when he started, but he said the situation is nowhere near where it needs to be compared to other professionals.
Consider Hamilton didn’t receive a coaching supplement in first year as a teacher at New Hope High. He said the only supplement he received was for driving a school bus route in the morning and in the afternoon. He coached nine seasons at the school before he moved to West Point High, where he stayed until 1991-92. When he left coaching, he became an assistant principal for the west campus of the new Columbus High. He said his first contract was for $40,000. “I thought I was making more money than anybody in the state of Mississippi,” Hamilton said. “When you consider where I had been, I was, but inflation always takes care of the raise. You learn to make it on what you have got.”
Hamilton spent 10 years in that capacity and didn’t coach. He returned to coaching in 2008 to join Bubba Davis’ football coaching staff at Columbus High.
According to the United States Department of Labor, the $40,000 contract Hamilton signed in 1991 would be worth $69,853.74 today. His $6,600 contract in 1976 figures out to be $27,589.16 when you enter it into the Consumer Price Index’s inflation calculator.
Hamilton said plenty of factors have changed throughout the years that have impacted how teachers and coaches do their jobs and how students participate in school. When he started teaching and coaching, many of the athletes he worked with had part-time jobs. As a result, practices had to end by 5 p.m. because nearly all of the student-athletes had to go to work. At the time, he said New Hope was the “country school,” which meant many of student-athletes worked in agricultural jobs. He said he experienced the same dynamic when he moved to West Point High. He said it didn’t start to change until the mid 1980s.
“Because they all worked, they had more of a work ethic. They didn’t have to be taught how to work,” Hamilton said. “When you came to work in the weight room, you went to work. A lot more of the jobs were physical-type jobs. They worked on farms and things like that. They were used to doing hard, physical labor, and the heat didn’t seem to bother them near as much.”
Hamilton feels teachers and coaches are involved in a “blame game” that deflects attention from the things everybody should be focused on. While that may dissuade some from getting into the profession, Hamilton said he listens to younger teachers/coaches like Montgomery and former Columbus High and Mississippi State football player Tobias Smith, who is an assistant coach on Montgomery’s football staff, and believes many still get into their profession because they love working with kids.
Still, things have changed.
“There was more of a close-knit connection, particularly between parents and teachers, and parents have robbed themselves of some of that trust. I know that,” Hamilton said. “We have taken for granted, in a lot of cases, it ought to be done somewhere else and we haven’t handled things the way we ought to. We just don’t have the responsibility throughout the entire thing — from parents, teachers, and everybody concerned that we used to have. Don’t get me wrong. I think there are some great teachers. We have a lot of those good teachers in Columbus (including his daughter, Erica Lewis, who is a third-grade teacher at Sale Elementary School in Columbus).
“Right now, everything is falling on coach Montgomery’s shoulders, and it shouldn’t be. But that is part of the thing. He is the head coach and it is going to fall there, but it is everybody’s job to educate these kids and it is all of our jobs to coach these kids and to get them turned around and get them going where they need to go.”
Hamilton is confident Montgomery will do a good job with the Columbus High football program. Even though he hasn’t seen Montgomery teach in the classroom, he knows he is a good teacher because he has seen him work with the football players. He said a good coach is a good teacher, regardless of where you are. He doesn’t know what will happen to teachers and coaches in the future, but he knows there always will be people who enjoy being around children for the right reasons.
“Just being able to share with a young man how to do something — sometimes it gets exasperating having to do it over and over, but when you see that light bulb cone on and he has got it, there is no better feeling in the world,” Hamilton said.
Private sector
Barrett Donahoe has worked at enough schools in the state of Mississippi to know life as a teacher and a coach is more than what happens on Friday night.
Even though he didn’t play football in college, he acknowledges the adrenaline is still there every week and that it energizes him to stalk the sidelines every week.
But Donahoe also realized very quickly that what he does is a job and that teachers and coaches have to be committed to help student-athletes become better young men and young women. As much as it is a cliche, he discovered early on that it is “about the kids” and that you have to stay focused on that.
“If you don’t care for your students-athletes and your students and you are in it just for yourself and the fun you think baseball, basketball, or football is going to bring you’re not going to be in it very long because you are going to find that 99 percent of what you do doesn’t have anything to do with that game on Friday night during the fall,” Donahoe said. “It definitely changes as you get your feet wet and you see it in an entirely different light.”
Donahoe, who started teaching when he was 22 years old, is in his third year as football coach and athletic director at Heritage Academy in Columbus. He acknowledges he didn’t get into the business to make a lot of money. He also recognizes the salary he earns teaching at a private school isn’t as much as what he would make at a public school. He believes private schools in the state of Mississippi have done a good job in the past 15 years making teachers and coaches salaries more competitive. Still, he admits there have been times when he has “struggled.” Through all the ups and down, though, he said there never has been a day he has “dreaded” coming to work.
That love for what he does explains why Donahoe has worked in Arkansas, at Jackson Academy, at Tri-County Academy in Flora, at Copiah Academy in Gallman, at Pillow Academy in Greenwood, and at Marshall Academy in Holly Springs. He said he has enjoyed his time at Heritage Academy, which is in the highest classification — Class AAA — in the Mississippi Association of Independent Schools. While the evolution of social media and technology has made the world smaller for student-athletes, Donahoe said the result has been a decrease in the amount of school pride student-athletes have. He said that makes it tougher for teachers and coaches to keep the student-athletes focused on their lessons and their sports.
On the other hand, Donahoe doesn’t believe athletes in the “old” days were tougher than today’s athletes. In his time as a professional, Donahoe said the biggest change has come on the side of teachers. He said he has talked with a lot of people who work in private schools and that it is evident that there aren’t a lot of younger teachers and coaches out there.
“I think financial (reasons) are a big part of it,” Donahoe said. “I think a lot of people are very intimidated by the idea of struggling financially early in your career. The salaries of first-year coaches and teachers are not that impressive. Like I said, you have to have a genuine desire to interact with kids and to be around kids every day. You have to have a genuine love for the individuals you are around and you have to want the success for all your students or you are not going to be successful teacher or coach.”
Donahoe said it takes a special person to take on that responsibility, either as a teacher or a coach. He said it becomes even more difficult when schools try to find coaches who have an expertise in Olympic sports like volleyball or soccer. As a result, private schools, like Heritage Academy, often rely on part-time staff members as coaches. Liz Fields (volleyball) and Joe Asadi (girls and boys soccer) work in that capacity at the school.
In public schools, coaches often have to have the right teaching opening at a new school if they hope to coach there, too. At some schools, coaches will work at the middle school or elementary school in another subject or discipline while they coach a sport at the high school.
Donahoe recommends teachers and coaches become more versatile and able to work in more than one subject or in more than one sport to make them more marketable. He isn’t sure if that will happen before or after salaries for teachers and coaches see an increase in the level of their pay.
“I think if you asked most people they would tell you they would like to see teachers’ salaries increase, ” Donahoe said. “I think you’re only going to attract and keep good teachers if you are willing to pay them money to stay. No teacher — or coach– goes into the profession with the idea they are going to become wealthy. They go into it because they love the children and the students. They go into it because they love what they do and they have a passion for it.
“Do I see the salaries increasing? I think they are, but also the cost of living is increasing. The cost of living is increasing just as much as salaries are increasing. Being able to continue to raise salaries as the cost of living gets more and more is going to be vital to keeping people in this profession.”
From assistant to head coach
Tyrone Shorter recalls how he first thought he might become a teacher.
During an exercise in sixth grade, Shorter’s teacher had her students write down what they wanted to be when they grew up. Shorter wrote he wanted to become a professional football player.
Shorter’s teacher then asked him a good question, “What happens if you get hurt?”
Shorter had never thought of that and was left in a quandary. His teacher asked him if he had considered going into coaching. That message stuck with him through junior high school, high school, and college.
More than 20 years later, including the past 17 at Noxubee County High, Shorter has imparted the same life lessons to student-athletes on the school’s football team. He said he realized in high school that he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his coaches so he could stay around the game and help mold the lives of young men, just like his teachers and coaches did for him.
“I think teaching and coaching is one of the best professions in the world,” Shorter said, “because we get a chance to change the lives of young people.”
Shorter attended Port Gibson High School and signed a football scholarship to play football at Alcorn State. He spent two seasons at Hinds Community College before transferring to Austin Peay. He was invited to the San Diego Chargers’ training camp in 1996 and made the practice squad before he was hurt. He then spent a year playing football (defensive back) in Canada (1997) before he returned to Mississippi.
Shorter planned to stay only a year in the state. He said he was in between opportunities when M.C. Miller offered him a job as an assistant coach at Noxubee County High. He received an invitation to go to training camp with the Tennessee Titans, but opted to follow the dream he had in college and go into coaching.
In his time at the school, he has been a part of two coaching staffs that led the Tigers to state titles (2008, 2012). He said he realized early on he wasn’t going to make a lot of money, especially not like a doctor or a lawyer, but he discovered his job might be a calling, like how some people get “called” to preach. He said he has so many sick leave days built up because he loves coming to work. He agrees with someone who once told him that you had better love what you do because you’re not going to be successful if you aren’t.
Shorter’s love for what he does helps make all the extra hours during the week and the five to six hours spent on Sundays preparing game plans helps him overcome the math and overshadows what he makes because all of the hours he and his coaches work don’t really count toward their salaries.
While Shorter would love to see those salaries increase, he isn’t sure if that will happen. If he had a chance, he likely would send a teacher to the state legislators to remind them about the importance of teachers.
“Your doctors and lawyers, who taught them? Teachers,” Shorter said. “I don’t know why everybody ants to put education and teachers’ salaries on the back burner. I think teachers’ salaries should be up there with other people because you wouldn’t have doctors and lawyers if they didn’t have good teachers at the beginning.
“I hope one day somebody gets into these top offices (of government) and says, ‘Teachers make nothing.’ You can do all you want, but you have to have teachers.”
Follow Dispatch sports editor Adam Minichino on Twitter @ctsportseditor
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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