A coach is one of the most important hires a district can make !!

[logank013]

The biggest issues I have with hiring sport coaches is how much many of them are payed. There was a coach in my district that left to another school for a higher salary and has been rumored to have a 6 digit salary. I couldn't ever imagine a school district putting 6 digits into hiring a coach for a STEM program like robotics. One thing about sports however, particularly football, is that they do generate revenue. The schools sell tickets to the game to help pay for some of the football program costs. There are a few school districts around where I live who do have big stadiums and always fill them up. One of the schools who always fills their stadium just won the state title to the highest class in our state. They are the type of programs that can afford expensive coaches but many can not. The ones that can't afford an expensive coach should be the ones pouring money into school programs to educate kids. If your football program is making lots of money and it pays itself back, then that's ok. It's the schools that hire coaches for a lot of money and are fine with losing lots of money that are a problem in my opinion.

One thing that is bad about comparing Robotics with sports is that robotics won't probably ever sell tickets to each event. I also don't see a robotics event filling up the stands with spectators (Not including team members, scouts, or family members!) for a while unless it is very well advertised and people truly care about the event (cultural change). I think FIRST is trying to jump into the sport aspect too fast. FIRST still needs to focus on development before we worry about drawing the amount of spectators FIRST eventually hopes to get to. It interests me greatly to see if first will ever get to the point where a school district will hire someone as a coach for an immense amount of money like in football. I don't ever see that happening since football makes a good amount of cash back where FIRST never will make much money back.

However, as some of you have mentioned, schools are hiring "robotics coaches". I assume that these coaches are also full time teachers who teach a robotics class or two at the end of the school day to let FIRST students work on robots. I'm also assuming that they are hired for the same amount of money or slightly more than a "regular teacher". Can I get some examples of what I said or what contradict what I said? Thank you.