If you wanted to begin a career in NCAA coaching, you might consider being a “volunteer coach.” You’d get on-the-job training and possibly a good reference from a head coach to a paying job.
Joseph Colon, Shannon Ray and Kyle McKinley may have thought along these lines, too, when they agreed to be volunteer coaches at Fresno State, Arizona State and Oklahoma, respectively.
In a recently filed lawsuit for themselves and more than 1,000 Division I volunteer coaches, they highlight what volunteering means.
It means working a “full-time week, weekends, early mornings and late nights” while performing “many, if not all, of the same job duties as the paid coaches working out of the same set of athletic department offices.”
They worked without “health insurance, housing or other benefits, much less an actual salary in exchange for work performed.”
They took these unpaid jobs for their “career aspirations and love of sport which (they) ... bring to their institutions and the student-athletes they coach.”
The NCAA has replied in court, saying that these volunteers failed “to show that they lost money and were injured as a result of NCAA bylaws” because they have not alleged “that the Division I institution they volunteered for would have hired an additional paid coach in the sport they coach if the bylaws did not exist.”
So, who’s right?
I think the volunteer coaches will win — and this will end up costing the NCAA and many D-I schools.
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