Why College Coaches Need Different Financial Advice Than Athletes

If you'll allow me to be self-serving for a moment, I need to vent.

As I've been trying to build my advisory practice for college coaches, I've also been trying to expand my network of professionals so that I can have resources available to help coaches in ways that I cannot. If there's something that I specifically or legally can't do for coaches directly (think provide tax or legal advice), I want to be able to say hey I know someone and hook everyone up.

But I don't want just any ol' bum with a pulse. I work specifically with college coaches, so I feel as though a completely reasonable standard for any other professional that I work with in this capacity should be that they also work specifically with college coaches.

Wanna know something weird?

They don't exist!

Sure, I find some references here and there to coaches. Usually in the rough form of the following sentence:

"Serving athletes, entertainers, executives, business owners, and coaches."

Like.... Those are not the same things!

I can understand it if you're working in the athletics world and you say something like serving athletes and coaches. Fine. That's defensible to me. A little.

But when coach gets tacked on at the end of a list of professions that seemingly have very little to do with each other besides income?

Well, forgive me for thinking that your interest in serving college coaches feels a little... disingenuous.

You may as well start adding every other buzz word you can think of if you're just trying to cover all possible options

"We serve athletes, entertainers, executives, business owners, millennials, baby boomers, engineers, doctors, dentists, politicians, administrators, retirees, pre-retirees, people with a pulse, oh, and college coaches."

My issue is that none of this actually tells me if the professional or firm that I'm looking at is any good or not! They might be kick-ass at what they do, but I'm so turned off by how they treat coaches as a tacked-on afterthought that I don't want to waste my time trying to explain what I'm looking for and hoping that they understand and can give it to me.

If coaches are an afterthought in your marketing, they're probably an afterthought in your practice.

And if coaches are an afterthought in your practice, you're not the type of professional that I need in my network.

But I like to think of myself as a gracious dude. Maybe you really just don't understand coaches that well. So let's talk about what college coaches are and are not.

College Coaches Are Not Just "Sports Clients"

This is the first thing that trips people up, because the world of sports already gets seen as a tricky and specific realm to operate in. And that's because people in the sports industry do face unique challenges compared to the general population. In the sports world, it's a pretty safe bet that you'll be dealing with sudden wealth, uneven income, multiple income streams, unknown career spans, public pressure and scrutiny, legal complexity, competitiveness, contracts, multi-state travel, and trust issues.

And it's only going to get more complicated as more investors continue to enter sports. Traditionally, when someone thought of a high-income earner in the sports world, they would think of one of the Big 4 Major Leagues (NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA). Right or wrong, whatever, I'm not here to debate the semantics. But there were certainly a lot of facets of the sports world that were previously not highly complicated, highly complex endeavors, compared to today.

Take the WNBA for example. A 1998 newspaper archive described WNBA salaries at the time as averaging between $20,000-$40,000 for a 28-game season, with a high end of $50,000 for top players. That range hovers right around the 1997 Census-reported median income of full-time, year-round workers aged 25-34, which for men was $30,145, and for women was $25,144.

Nowhere near the kind of money people tend to imagine when they hear "professional athlete."

Now, in 2026, the new WNBA collective bargaining agreement lays minimum salaries out at $270,000-$300,000, and those minimums (as well as the rest of the league's contracts) will continue to rise over the next six years. The league's average salary is expected to be $583,000 in 2026, with a max contract of $1,400,000. None of which accounts for increased endorsement and exposure opportunities now compared to nearly three decades ago as the league continues to explode in popularity thanks to new stars like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers, and Flau'jae Johnson pushing the envelope on what was previously possible for WNBA athletes' earning powers.

For reference, full-time, year-round workers aged 25-34 in 2024 (most recently available data from Census.gov), had a median income of $62,100 for men and $55,250 for women.

Another example of the shifting economics in sport is the world of track and field. For the longest time, the history of Olympic amateurism had kept the earning potential of even the biggest stars of the sport constrained. It wasn't even until the 80s that track and field athletes were even allowed to accept prize money or endorsement money, but that money had to be placed into a trust fund that could only be accessed before retirement for training related expenses.

It took a while for track and field to emerge from that amateurism funk. But increased investment in the sport and exposure has given more opportunities for endorsements and significant prize money to alter the landscape.

The biggest track and field stars nowadays are not just fast and strong. They're heavily marketable.

It used to be that a professional track and field athlete made enough from a shoe sponsorship to support training and that was basically it. They were likely to work a second job or barely scrape by on charity. Now, the top athletes are more akin to influencers, with stars like Faith Kipyegon, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Mondo Duplantis, Noah Lyles, Neeraj Chopra, Sha'Carri Richardson, Tara Davis-Woodhall, and Hunter Woodhall utilizing a blend of winning, personality, national-market power, product partnerships, social following, unique family stories, fashion, culture, and direct audience ownership to juice their earnings.

Of course, the elephant in the room here is how college athletics have been radically transformed by the introduction of Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) payments that have allowed college athletes to participate in this endorsement/visibility economy before even becoming professionals. The full history of the transition from amateurism to the current state of the college athletic economy is outside of the scope of this blog post, but business has been booming since payments became allowable in July of 2021.

The annual Opendorse report estimates that the NIL market will spend an estimated $2.55 billion dollars for the 2025-2026 school year. It's a new, rapidly evolving, rapidly expanding, and robust economy for a demographic that previously could not directly monetize themselves.

As this economy has exploded, it's also led to an explosion of professionals in the space directly positioning themselves to serve this market. Which made sense, because from a financial-services standpoint, college athletes started to look more like young professional athletes. The work, problems, situations, all started to look similar. Sports and Entertainment focused firms could easily expand their services to encompass the college world, now serving an athlete throughout a longer span of their athletic career.

This has all led to "sports and entertainment" becoming an incredibly attractive professional-services category. Athletes now have more monetizable value, more income complexity, more tax exposure, more deal flow, and more need for guidance.

But coaches are not athletes.

Just because college coaches (and for that matter, professional coaches) exist in the same environment as athletes, doesn't mean that they belong in the same planning box.

Coaches and athletes are two very distinct, very different professions that operate in the same space. Approaching both in the same way from a planning perspective would be like going to a pond and pointing at a fish and a frog and saying "those are the same animal." Like... no. They're just wet and hang out in the same places.

The difference between athletes and coaches

At the risk of insulting your intelligence, let's get some obvious stuff out of the way.

Athletes are directly competing. They're on the field, putting their body in harm's way, playing the game or running the race or whatever the sport requires.

Coaches are fostering the environment for the athletes to perform. They're managing the game, the practices, the athletes, and the rest of the people that make up the program.

Both athlete and coach make up significant and critical components of the sports industry. There would be no industry at all if it were not for the athletes. And the athletes need coaches and support staff to create the conditions for peak athletic performance.

This is where we draw the line in the sand that delineates the financial insecurities both groups face.

Athletes deal with a compressed timeline. Their star shines bright and brief, as they have only the span of their physical prime to maximize career earnings related directly to their sport. Many top athletes are able to position themselves to take advantage of their playing career long into retirement (think Tom Brady or Shaq), but it's still different than being an active athlete. Besides, Brady and Shaq are the exceptions, not the norm. Depending on the league and how the data is counted, commonly cited career length averages for professional athletes range from roughly three to seven years.

This compressed timeline brings a bevy of problems. When servicing an athlete from a financial perspective, you have to consider not only their physical prime, but things like roster status, contract negotiations, jock taxes, endorsement monetization, and full-throttle maximization to prepare said athlete for their "first retirement" and second career.

Coaches, on the other hand, don't have that same compressed timeline based on a physical prime. A coaching career can span decades. And with that career window expanded, the inherent instability of the profession is stretched out as well. It's less a mad rush to maximize earnings over a smaller period of time, and more a conscientious effort to build a solid foundation in a career made of shifting sand.

This fundamentally changes how coaches are impacted by the sports industry.

Imagine trying to run a race on an unknown obstacle course. You know nothing beforehand about what surface(s) you'll be running on, whether the course is flat or full of hills, turns, or obstacles. You are only given one piece of information about the race before the gun goes off: how long the race itself is.

Imagine that you are told this race is 100 meters long. When the gun goes off, you attack everything in front of you with gusto and vigor. You're not worried about saving your energy for what comes next because you already know the race is short. You can even see the finish line just ahead.

Now imagine that instead of this race being 100 meters long, you're told the race is 10 miles long. Do you still attack everything with the same intensity? Of course not. In fact, not only do you pace yourself for the distance, you hold back even more because you have no idea what types of challenges remain in the miles ahead.

By stretching out the distance, you have dramatically increased the effect that uncertainty has on you. This is the fundamental difference between the financial issues that coaches and athletes experience in the sports world.

The instability of coaching

Let's look at what actually makes the coaching industry feel so unstable. Some of these factors will be similar to those that affect athletes. Some of these will be coach specific.

The first factor is open competitiveness. We'll further explore what it is that coaches actually do on a regular basis later in this post, but, rightly or wrongly, coaches are judged on team performance. And team performance is a very public yet very misleading metric to use as a judgment for how a coach performs. Yet it happens all the time.

School A plays school B. School A beats school B. Is the coach of School A better than the coach of School B? Intuitively, you probably understand that's a hard question to answer, especially with very little information. What are the schools like? What resources are available? What is the talent like? Where are the schools able to recruit from? What kind of fluky, lucky stuff happened during the game?

A byproduct of how sports work is that we like to assign tidy wins and losses to everyone involved. Athletes aren't immune to this, of course. Think of the classic QB Wins debate, where quarterbacks are assigned a disparate amount of credit for wins and losses, yet are still just one player amongst a significantly larger roster. But coaches get dinged even harder here, because they can't even be on the field to impact the game. In fact, for most coaches, 99% of the work happens between games, with that last 1% being more about showing up and putting the players in a position to do what they do best.

Those dynamics differ per sport too. My background is as a track coach, and there's certainly a feeling of helplessness of standing on the side of the track, clicking off splits as your athlete strains through the 25 laps of a 10k, knowing that there's really not that much you can do at that point to help them.

AND YET, to Joe Public, if my athlete beats another coach's athlete in that 10k, that must mean I coached better.

That's the instability problem in a nutshell. One of the most visible metrics for team and coaching success is wins and losses, but wins and losses really don't tell you anything about what a coach does. Which brings us to the next factor of instability: what a coach actually does.

A college coach's job description can be wildly different from school to school, from sport to sport. The public has this idea that being a college coach is all about practice and games. But it's waaaay more than that.

Being a college coach means you're recruiting, constantly. For many schools, this is actually the most important part of the job, and often defines what success looks like internally (meaning coaches get hired and fired based on their ability to recruit). Recruiting is a janky combination of sales and developing relationships, and sometimes it's hard to reconcile those two elements in a way that satisfies everyone.

For some coaches, it's easy. Bigger programs that are fully funded with scholarships and are less concerned with overall enrollment can approach recruiting with a specificity and selectivity that more or less keeps administration off their backs. But at these programs, there's still enormous pressure to win, so coaches can't afford for many of their highly paid recruits to not pan out.

For other coaches, it's more difficult. Many smaller schools are more enrollment driven, which means they depend on continually growing their incoming class size and overall undergraduate population in order to hit financial targets and keep the doors open. At these schools, coaches can be viewed as an unofficial extension of the admissions department and are given recruiting quotas with the lovely reminder that the ability of the athletic department and the school generally being able to function depends on the women's soccer coach specifically being able to recruit 30 new athletes a year on 6 total scholarships. And no one wants to hear about culture fit or talent or any of that nonsense. Students can quit your team the first week of practice as long as they stay enrolled, as far as the school is concerned.

Either way, no matter what flavor of recruiting we're talking about, a college coach HAS to recruit. It's part of the job, but certainly not the only part. College coaches have to be able to navigate the admissions and financial aid department, because when parents have questions about enrollment or money, they aren't hitting up the appropriate departments, they're hitting up the coaches. College coaches have to stay on top of academic eligibility for their athletes, because while professors certainly care about how students are doing, they aren't that invested in making sure student-athletes are hitting mandated minimums to be allowed to play. College coaches also have to have managerial skills to handle other coaches and players, have to have counseling skills because everyone comes to them with personal problems, have to have budgeting and fiscal skills to handle the program's budgets, operations, fundraising, etc. It's a lot of different hats, and they don't even wear the same hats from season to season, let alone from program to program.

Imagine having a career where you don't even know what your actual job description is from year to year.

I understand that you probably deal with constant change. If you're a CPA, the tax code changes. If you're an attorney, the law changes. If you're an insurance agent, the rules, regulations, and available products change. But you still at least have a general idea of what your day-to-day will look like five years from now. College coaches don't have that luxury, and it significantly impacts how they operate in life.

Instability becomes the Mentality

Many careers have periods of instability baked into the natural progression of things, most often at the beginning. If you're growing your practice, you're probably experiencing a little bit of that now, especially when it comes to not knowing when your next paying client will appear, or where they'll come from.

But for many coaches, instability is not just a phase of their career. It becomes a part of how they understand their career as a whole.

That all sticks, even as the facts of the career start to level out.

Some coaches, athletes, and other mindset gurus call this "staying hungry," but it's deeper than that. Staying hungry suggests that it's about continuing to work hard and prove yourself no matter what you've achieved, not allowing yourself to get complacent. I have no beef with that concept. But if you think about it in a literal sense, if someone was "staying hungry," they'd be suffering from malnutrition, atrophy, mental fatigue, and all sorts of other physical issues. In this metaphorical sense, the side effects are more sinister. What atrophies is the ability to think and plan for the future.

What atrophies is the ability to think and plan for the future.

Psychologists refer to the capacity to imagine specific events in the future as episodic future thinking. To drastically dumb it down a bit, it's a similar brain mechanism to remembering events of the past, except instead of imagining things that have happened, you're imagining things in the future that have yet to happen. You're specifically constructing scenes and thinking about them, visualizing them. For example, if you want to buy a house in 10 years, you might imagine yourself in your dream house, standing in your kitchen, looking around your bedroom, seeing everything how you want it.

What's interesting is that experiencing uncertainty appears to reduce your ability to reproduce these future scenarios, meaning that if you've thought about your dream home or dream career or dream trip or something like that, you'd have a harder time imagining that stuff again. This can make planning, goal pursuit, and all other future-oriented behaviors more difficult to implement because your brain has to work harder to pull up a usable vision of the future.

It's almost a cliché sometimes to say that coaches are all about tackling one thing at a time. Win today. Win this rep. One game at a time. We're on to Cincinnati. Who would have guessed that there was a real, psychological reason that coaches adopted this mindset? For many coaches, they can have a tough time concretely thinking any further ahead in life due to the inherent instability of their professions!

This affects how coaches think about things like housing, saving, spending, career moves, family decisions, risk, trust, long-term planning, and identity outside of the profession.

In order to have a proper conversation with a college coach about ANY of that stuff, you have to help them feel like they have steady ground underneath their feet.

Coaches aren't hard to understand because the sports industry is some complex behemoth. Coaches are hard to understand because their profession creates a level of instability that outsiders routinely discount and dismiss. Before any CPA, attorney, advisor, agent, or other professional can serve them well, they have to understand that instability is not a side issue. It's the issue that everything else in a coach's life tends to orbit.

In the next post, we'll explore how you can start positioning yourself to serve college coaches better, including unpacking some common bad assumptions professionals make about coaches.