NCAA volleyball coaches salaries rising, but trail basketball, others

When Texas and Nebraska faced off in the NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball Championship title match this past December in Tampa, it featured two of the most prominent coaches in the sport.

Jerritt Elliott and John Cook have a combined seven national titles and won more than 83 percent of their matches over the 20-plus years they’ve been at their respective schools.

They are also two of the highest-paid coaches in college volleyball.

Including bonuses for reaching the national-title match and winning the Big Ten championship, Cook earned $978,750 for the 2023 season.

Elliot was paid $724,750 for winning the national title (Both numbers could be higher once camps and other perks are factored in).

However, those volleyball salaries pale in comparison to what the coaches in last year’s women’s basketball championship game were paid. LSU’s Kim Mulkey earned a reported $3.3 million for the 2022-23 season, while Iowa’s Lisa Bluder earned more than $1.14 million.

And then both basketball coaches received contract extensions. Mulkey signed a 10-year, $36 million deal, making her the highest-paid coach in her sport, while Bluder signed an agreement that increased her base pay to $1 million, which made her the ninth-highest amount in women’s basketball.

While volleyball continued to make great strides on the court, in the stands and on television in 2023, the sport still has ground to make up in budgets and salaries compared to other women’s sports, especially basketball.

“Women’s volleyball is booming, and comparing our salaries across the board to women’s basketball, they’re a lot less,” Creighton coach Kristen Bernthal Booth said.

While there is no single answer for why volleyball lags so far behind basketball and many male sports, however, almost every coach interviewed said one factor is that volleyball doesn’t have a comparable male sport.

Men’s and women’s basketball are the most straightforward pairing. Softball and baseball balance each other, and soccer is offered for both genders at many schools. Of NCAA sports, only field hockey, rowing, and bowling do not have male equivalents.

“We don’t have a male counterpart, and I think that’s probably the biggest reason,” Pitt coach Dan Fisher said. “Along with that, women’s basketball has been on TV much more than we have. The more we get on TV, though, it’ll continue to get better.”

Volleyball – along with women’s gymnastics – is different because the female sport is more popular than the male version. While 28 Division I schools play men’s volleyball, with two more joining in 2025, the women’s game far outpaces it for attention and spending.

“This is the only sport that women are leading the way,’ Wisconsin coach Kelly Sheffield said. “You don’t have that advantage of being able to compare what is going on in the men’s side.”

One coach said that when they try to compare their salaries to women’s basketball, the administration shuts the conversation down. They only want to look at the same sport. Fisher said administrators often first look within their conference and then look nationally at other volleyball coaches.

The AVCA publishes an annual salary survey that helps lay out what other volleyball coaches are using, but administrators are not guaranteed to see the report. Booth, the AVCA president, said they encourage top-tier coaches to get agents.

“Hopefully, they have that leverage to continue to move the needle,” she said. “Most coaches are pretty good about sharing that information. Some of its public records, but they can hide money, like a base salary does not tell the whole story.”

Comparing coach’s salaries is not always straightforward. The base salary listed in contracts might not truly reflect what head coaches are paid. They may be paid extra for media appearances, and almost all coaches have incentives based on conference and postseason success.

While all NCAA schools have to submit annual financial information to the NCAA, the transparency level varies from institution to institution. Private schools, like nine-time champion Stanford, do not have to release any financial information. Several public institutions are covered under a state exemption to open records laws. For example, Penn State does not have to disclose individual salaries for coaches – only how much total compensation the staff receives.

Cook and Elliott, of course, are on the higher end of the coaching pay rate.

Kentucky coach Craig Skinner, whose team won the spring 2021 NCA A title, has a base rate of $475,000, while Sheffield, whose team won it all in 2020, starts at $474,445. The commonality between all four is they’ve won a national championship.

However, Cook, who has won four NCAA titles, lost part of his compensation package last year.

In his previous contract, which was signed in 2020 when Bill Moos was the athletic director, Cook was slated to earn a $750,000 retention bonus if he was still the Nebraska coach on December 31, 2022. However, Cook signed an updated contract with new AD Trev Alberts before then, which nullified the bonus. For the fiscal year 2023, Cook received $1.42 million in total compensation.

In the new contract, Cook’s base salary went from $675,000 in 2022 to $725,000 for the 2023 season and up to $750,000 on February 1, 2024. In addition to the salary increase, Cook added a clause where family members could travel to four regular-season away matches and postseason tournament matches.

Louisville’s Dani Busboom Kelly is one of the higher-paid women coaches, with a base rate of $400,000. Florida’s Mary Wise earned $495,233 in fiscal year 2022. Ohio State’s Jen Flynn Oldenburg’s base rate is just over $300,000. She earned more than $400K for the 2021-22 year. Fisher of Pittsburgh’s base salary for 2023 was $521,833.

Most first-year coaches start on the lower end of the pay scale.

Leslie Gabriel began with a base salary of $187,000 at Washington after being elevated last year from an assistant coach after taking over for Keegan Cook. Cook left for Minnesota and signed a contract with the Gophers with a base pay of $425,000.

Oklahoma’s Aaron Mansfield earned a base salary of $230,000 for his first season in 2023. Assistant Mike Schall replaced long-time coach Joe Sagula at North Carolina last year. Schall had a base contract of just $150,000 for the 2023 season. Meanwhile, Texas A&M first-year coach Jamie Morrison operated this past season without a signed contract.

While all these coaches make six figures, how they stack up in each athletic department varies greatly.

John Cook at Nebraska and Hugh McCutcheon at Minnesota were the only volleyball coaches with the highest respective salaries for women’s sports at their schools during the 2021-22 academic year. McCutcheon, who retired after the 2022 season, was at that time the highest-paid volleyball coach in the nation.

Of the schools where the volleyball coach ranks second, they all trailed women’s basketball. In addition, Ohio State’s ice hockey coach and the LSU softball coach were also paid more than the volleyball coach at those schools.

Sagula, who guided the Tar Heels for 33 years, earned just $292,356 for fiscal year 2022. He was the sixth highest-paid coach of a women’s sport at Carolina, trailing basketball, soccer, field hockey, lacrosse and tennis.

Arkansas coach Jason Watson had a base salary of $247,610 but trails basketball, softball, soccer, track and field, gymnastics and golf.

“What value does volleyball bring to university versus basketball, football, or baseball?” Skinner asked. “I believe that success and value should be comparable because we’ve already portrayed in college athletics that it’s not a typical business model.

“So it’s a challenge. It’s difficult. My biggest issue with the whole thing is that the spending gap keeps getting bigger. And (women’s athletics) is 100 years behind.”

Booth said when she makes the case for increasing the investment in volleyball, she doesn’t want it to come at the expense of other women’s sports. Fans of volleyball are likelier to be fans of softball or other women’s sports.

“We don’t want to make it us versus other women’s sports. We want to build up the fact that women’s sports are booming,” she said. “We don’t think these things are finite. We want to build each other up as women’s sports advocates because we think we’ve got great products and a lot of different sports.”

Coaches salaries are just one part of the overall investment in the sport.

Television exposure, expanded support staff and additional resources can all make a difference in the program. While exposure and popularity are increasing for volleyball, revenues still have a ways to go to have programs make money.

The Lincoln Journal Star reported that only one public Power 5 women’s program turned a profit: Nebraska volleyball.

While several women’s basketball programs brought in more revenue than Nebraska – South Carolina listed $4.1 million in revenue, while UConn reported $3.5 million – the higher income was offset by larger coaches contracts. According to USA Today’s database, Dawn Staley is paid $2.7 million at South Carolina, while UConn’s Geno Auriemma earns $2.9 million.

Cook, the highest earner in college volleyball, makes a quarter of that amount, which also allows Nebraska volleyball to be profitable.

Even as volleyball blossoms, there are still areas for growth.

Earlier this year, ESPN agreed to a new television contract to broadcast season on its network. The deal includes 21 women’s and 19 men’s events, including volleyball and women’s basketball. The deal’s value increased from approximately $40 million per year to $115 million annually.

Sheffield says they still have room to improve upon postseason coverage. Having all the first- and second-round NCAA matches streamed on ESPN+ is a positive step, but when ESPN first made season streaming plan, announcers would not be provided, but they later reversed course after public outcry.

“A few years ago when we were told that for the first time ever, all the matches are going to be streamed that opening weekend,” Sheffield said. “Oh by the way, there’s not going to be any announcers. It’s like we’re getting too excited about this. Are there improvements in different things, whether it’s the court, whether it’s financial things, absolutely. But it’s not the jumps that are happening with the ones that have a male comparison.”

Booth said former Creighton athletic director Bruce Rasmussen always said schools could invest a lot less into volleyball to build a top 20 program than you could into women’s basketball, and a lot of that is coaching salaries.

She said the sport has a lot of potential to grow in the Southeast and Northeast parts of the country. Booth said the path to building a program includes being full-funded for scholarships, having the right leadership in place, having the resources to travel to play the right teams, developing a marketing plan and charging admission to give the product value.

“If you have a plan, and you execute and then you have a good product, you can put butts in the seats,” Booth said.

Elliott said he keeps spreadsheets tracking all the program’s expenses and is always looking to find new ways to increase the value of the sport.

The sport has come a long way since the spring NCAA tournament in Omaha in April of 2021 during COVID, when tents were used as makeshift locker rooms when matches were played in a convention center. Still, not everything is perfect. At the 2023 NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball Championship, two teams were placed at the same hotel in Tampa. Their meeting and dining areas were adjacent and lacked privacy.

The fight for support also carries over to personnel and support staff. In a sampling of top programs,  the average volleyball coach made $148,032 during the 2022 fiscal year. That lags far behind the average of $239,759 for women’s basketball. Volleyball also trails the average assistant pay rate for softball ($152,512) and is just ahead of soccer ($135,158). The gap is even larger when adding in the factor that basketball had three assistants that year while volleyball, softball and soccer each had two but added another coaching position last season.

Cook recently received a call from a fellow Big Ten coach who said they were trying to convince their administration to allow them to add a technical/video coordinator. Cook and his program have access to support and plenty of resources, but not all coaches are as fortunate. He’s always trying to ensure that assistant coaches are paid well and aren’t tempted to leave for another assistant position at other schools because of salary.

“We fight those battles all the time,” Cook said. “It’s an easier battle for women’s basketball coaches to fight for those types of salary increases, staffing, and so on because the men have it.”

As one of the leaders in coaching salary, Elliott says he feels some pressure to raise the bar so his colleagues can also be paid more. Skinner said it’s a challenge to have conversations about salaries and financial support because he never dreamed he would make as much as he is from coaching volleyball.

However, the salaries reflect the coaches’ value to college athletics, support for a premier women’s sport, and laying the foundation for future coaches.

“It’s about doing what is right for our sport, ” Sheffield said, “and for the people that come behind us having the resources, the support and all those things.”

Click here to read our accompanying story that lists the top coaching salaries.

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