The Department of Athletics employs 18 head coaches, whose base salaries range from $17,126 annually to $240,000 per year. Meanwhile, the entire department runs on a budget of approximately $13 million annually — a budget funded by football and men’s basketball revenues, TV and radio deals and student athletic fees.

The coaches have the opportunity to increase their salaries through strong performances and longevity, and they are eligible for all raises state employees receive during their tenure — raises provided by the Athletics Department, not the state.

The most lucrative forms of income, though, for some of the coaches, particularly football and men’s basketball, come in the form of high-priced endorsement deals. For most of these coaches, the extra money of endorsements comes through their summer camps.

Men’s basketball coach Sidney Lowe and football coach Tom O’Brien, while they also have camps, pull in most of their endorsement money from Capitol Broadcasting through TV and radio shows and interviews after games.

Lowe also has a deal with the shoe company Adidas, while O’Brien receives additional income from both the North Carolina and Virginia high school coaches associations.

Such endorsements, Director of Athletics Lee Fowler said, are a vital part of landing and keeping top-notch coaches.

“Anything that totals up while they’re working to a certain amount of money is how people are hired and kept around,” Fowler said. “If they’ve either been successful before you hired them or they’re successful while they’re here, then all those income-producing situations create an asset to being able to keep good coaches.”

But Fowler noted the deals with shoe companies don’t just pad the pockets of the University’s top-paid coaches.

“Those shoe companies especially, though, add revenue to the department by giving us equipment for sports and that sort of thing,” Fowler said. “So it’s not just in salary, but it also helps us as far as total budget pie, benefiting from the use of uniforms and equipment, that sort of thing.”

Equality between men’s and women’s sports

A quick look at the salaries of State’s coaches shows that both soccer and tennis have men’s and women’s coaches with the same base salary. But the requirements of equality between men’s and women’s sports mandated by Title IX legislation passed in the 1970s are not the reason for these identical salaries, Fowler said.

“Title IX doesn’t automatically say you’ve got to pay them the exact same amount,” Fowler said.

But, with the situation as it is now, Fowler said he sees coaches performing on similar levels and having similar lengths of tenure. With those factors in mind, he said it makes sense for the two tennis coaches to be paid the same and the two soccer coaches to earn the same base salary.

Men’s and women’s soccer coaches George Tarantini and Laura Kerrigan, respectively, each earn $66,306 per year in base salary, while men’s and women’s tennis coaches Jon Choboy and Hans Olsen, respectively, each earn $61,342 per year.

Market factors

Accounting professor Roby Sawyers, who sits on the faculty athletic council, said the Department of Accounting often has to pay new faculty members more than some who have been around longer, something he said the department would rather not have to do.

Similarly, he said if the University wants athletic success, there is little choice but to pay its most prominent coaches high salaries.

“We pay them a lot of money,” Sawyers said. “But if you want to have a football team and a basketball team that can contend for ACC championships and national championships, you really don’t have any choice.”

Another factor that can affect negotiations between a coach and a school is the presence or absence of a state income tax. North Carolina has one — 8 percent off the top of an individual’s income — while Florida and Tennessee have no such tax.

While some of the endorsements may come from shoe companies that are not headquartered in the state a school is in, Sawyers said the income from those deals would still be taxable in the state of the school employing a coach.

He said it probably isn’t the No. 1 concern of coaches negotiating contracts, but simply another tool they have to increase their bargaining power with schools.

“I bet it would be a way they would try to get that extra money out of the University,” Sawyers said.