Chief Human Resources Officers,

At the most recent meetings of the BOG’s committee on personnel and tenure, when we have presented significant salary adjustments for coaches and/or senior athletic staff, the committee has consistently inquired about the financial health of the applicable athletics program and its ability to support the proposed salary adjustment. The committee has made clear that they will expect this information to be provided in order to favorably consider these requests in the future.

Therefore, we will ask that with any future salary increase requests for coaches or senior athletic administrators, that your on-line submission please include a substantive statement that describes the financial health of your institution’s athletic program. Is the program running a balanced budget or surplus? If not, are their specific plans in place to reconcile any budget challenges presently being experienced? Is the department confident in its ability to support the proposed salary adjustment on an ongoing basis given its overall cash flow?

This is not intended to be an overly lengthy or complex financial statement, nor are we seeking attachment of any detailed financial or budgetary analysis. However, your request should be accompanied by substantive information from your Athletic Director or CFO that will provide the Committee with assurance that the institution’s athletics program can support the added incremental costs resulting from the proposed salary adjustment.

My suggestion is to have a standard set of verbiage that is updated once per fiscal year that can be included with these salary requests as we are not requesting something customized to each request. As a rule of thumb, I would generally focus on requests where the proposed salary adjustments are $25,000 or greater, although you can feel free to include this with every coach or athletics administrator salary request if that’s easier for your staff process-wise. It is the very largest coach, assistant coach, and Athletic Director increases that are of most interest in this regard.

In the event a proposed increase does not include this information, our team will return the action to your office for further update. So, I’d ask you please to address this requirement with your initial submissions to avoid any unnecessary delay. This added requirement is effective immediately.

When we next update our EHRA salary action pre-approval matrix, we will add a footnote highlighting this requirement. In the meantime, if you have questions or wish to preview with us whatever information you propose to include in a future action of this nature, please contact Keith Dupuis in System Office Human Resources. We will work in collaboration with you and your team to get whatever standard verbiage you provide to a form that we are both confident will be sufficient for the Committee.