Coaches' big raises at Va. Tech, U.Va. funded by success
BY MIKE HARRIS AND JEFF WHITE
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITERS Dec 19, 2005

Virginia Tech football coach Frank Beamer got his start as a graduate assistant at the University of Maryland in 1972. Beamer didn't make enough to cover the $189 monthly rent on his apartment, so his father-in-law had to co-sign the lease.

The next year, Beamer got a big raise when he moved to The Citadel to become a full-time coach. He made $12,000 a year.

How things have changed.

On Jan. 1, Beamer will start working under a seven-year contract that will pay him $2,008,000 annually. His nine full-time assistants will make approximately $1.4 million combined next year.

The University of Virginia pays out big bucks for football coaches, too. In August, head coach Al Groh was awarded a new contract worth $1.7 million this year. He's eligible for a 5-percent cost-of-living increase each year, and so Groh's annual compensation could pass $2 million in a few years.

Where does the money come from?

Tech and U.Va. are state universities, but neither uses state funds to compensate its coaches. The athletic departments at U.Va. and Tech are self-supporting.

U.Va.'s athletic revenues for the 2004-05 school year totaled about $42 million, about $10 million more than in 2001-02, Athletic Director Craig Littlepage said. Tech's athletic department brought in nearly $46 million during the 2004-05 school year.

Sources for that revenue include the annual payout from the Atlantic Coast Conference, each of whose full members received about $9 million for 2004-05; corporate sponsorships; facility rentals; student fees; endowment income; and the sales of football and basketball tickets, merchandise and concessions.

"I think there's been growth in just about all of our revenue streams," Littlepage said.

Football has driven much of that growth, one reason U.Va. officials rewarded Groh, who's in his fifth season as coach at his alma mater, with a lucrative new contract.

"There are any number of pieces of the revenue pie where we've seen growth that could be attributable to football," Littlepage said.

Jim Weaver was an assistant football coach at Penn State in the late 1960s. His first salary was $8,500 a year. Weaver became Tech's athletic director on Sept. 24, 1997. If he'd been told then that one day he'd be paying one individual more than $2 million a year, Weaver would have laughed.

He's doing it now without hesitation, for a simple reason: His department's revenues have risen dramatically since he took over. Weaver's first year on the job, Tech had athletic revenue of $19.1 million. Four years later -- the year before the south end zone addition of Lane Stadium opened -- the Hokies' athletic department took in $26.9 million, and the total climbed to nearly $46 million last school year.

The addition of about 12,000 seats to Lane Stadium has increased the Hokies' revenue. So has renewed interest in Tech's basketball team.

"We can afford to do this now," Weaver said.

Tech is in its second year as an ACC member. It won't receive a full cut under the league's revenue-sharing plan until the 2006-07 school year. Even at the reduced rate, Tech brought in almost a million dollars more than it did in its final year as a full member of the Big East Conference. When the ACC championship game starts adding to the revenue pot and the Hokies get a full share, they could end up doubling what they made in the Big East.

At U.Va., Groh's $1.7 million package consists of $240,000 in base salary and $1.46 million in additional compensation. All of that will come out of the athletic budget, as will the compensation for the school's other coaches.

In all, Virginia paid about $13.6 million in coaching compensation last school year. U.Va. aspires to rank among the nation's elite in most sports, and such success doesn't come cheaply, Littlepage said.

"We want to be able to run a major program -- a comprehensive and broad-based program -- and we want to do that on the basis of having top [coaching] performers," Littlepage said. "And top performers are people who are going to be sought by other programs. To get these type of people and retain them, we need to be in that market of elite programs."

Beamer's compensation package under his new deal has four components. His base salary is $272,328. He has what's called a "retention incentive" of $1,620,672 that covers a wide variety of things, including speaking to various Hokie Clubs and promoting the school in other ways. He gets $80,000 a year from Nike and $35,000 a year from ISP Sports, which owns the school's radio rights.

Except for the $115,000 from Nike and ISP, Beamer's entire compensation comes out of the athletic department budget. No taxpayer money is used to pay Beamer, Weaver emphasized.

"Salaries have gone up across the board," Weaver said. "I would never have imagined they'd get this high, but they have. The way things stand now, we can handle it without straining our budget."

Said Beamer: "The market kind of drives it. When one guy gets it, that kind of sets the tone for the rest. I'd be the first one to tell you that football coaches are overpaid. But the market says that's what it is."

 

Cavs searching for fast-break points
By Whitelaw Reid / Daily Progress staff writer
December 18, 2005

SPOKANE, Wash. - Fast-break points can sometimes be misleading. The final stat sheet only showed six for the University of Virginia basketball team in its 80-69 loss to Gonzaga on Saturday night.
But pushing the ball - thus varying the game's tempo - was one reason why UVa was able to hang around the Zags for as long as it did.

Cavalier coach Dave Leitao said running is definitely something the team wants to do this season - when the opportunity presents itself.

"We haven't scored a lot of [fast-break points] mainly because we've played against slow-down teams [like] Richmond and Northwestern who don't let you run," Leitao said.

And, in the loss to Fordham on Dec. 7, the Cavs played without point guard Sean Singletary. That had a big effect on the team's transition game, Leitao said.

"[Singletary] makes us run better," Leitao said. "In the games we've played with him in the lineup, we may not have always gotten the conversions, but we got the ball more up and down better than people give us credit for."

In the second half against the Zags, Tunji Soroye leaked out ahead of the field for an easy dunk. Without any true post-up players, Singletary said the team needs those kinds of baskets.

"That [has to be] part of our offense," Singletary said. "We took advantage of the points in transition early, but we didn't do enough of it in the second half.

"No matter who we play, we always want to run. You can expect more of that."

The Cavs (3-4, 0-1 ACC) shot 45.6 percent from the field - their highest mark since the first game of the season versus Liberty - but were just 5 of 23 from 3-point range. However, Leitao said he didn't mind all the 3s.

"The game played out that way," he said. "We were driving and kicking. Most of the 3s we took were open. The ones I have a problem with are the ones we take that are contested. We don't have enough games shooting a high enough percentage, so I have to address that issue over the next month.

"But if the ball moved through penetration and allowed us to be open, you can't turn down open shots."

According to Leitao, the Cavs had trouble adjusting to the zone the Zags unveiled in the second half.

"We've faced a lot of zone and will continue to face a lot of zone," he said. "We've got four or five things we can go to counteract that. But it took us a long time to get into [our zone offense], and then we got passive."

DUNKS: Virginia hosts Loyola Friday at 7 p.m.

Singletary said his hip injury, which caused him to miss the Fordham game, did not bother him that much against Gonzaga. "It's all part of the game," he said. "You play through it and do what you can." Singletary's career-high 35 points were the most scored at Gonzaga since Ronny Turiaf had 40 against Idaho in 2004.

Leitao on his decision to start Jason Cain for the first time this season: "Practice determined that. He had been practicing pretty well, so that's why I did it."

J.R. Reynolds did as good a job as could be expected in trying to guard the Zags' Adam Morrison, drawing a charge on Morrison in the second half. On offense, he played better against the Zags than in his two previous games, but not good enough according to Leitao: "He had 10 points," Leitao said. "He needs to give us more than 10 points if we're going to put ourselves in position to play the 10th-ranked team in the country on the road, in their gym. He's got to give us more."