By ANDREW SIMONSON | Sports Editor
With the way the coaching carousel turns, it’s fairly common for any school to need to fill a position at the end of the fall, winter and spring seasons.
Across football, volleyball, basketball, baseball, softball and soccer, local schools have had 18 head coaching vacancies in the past academic year, spanning from Class 7A down to the AISA and ACSC schools.
What’s uncommon is for three of those vacancies to come from the same Class 7A school during the same season.
That is exactly what happened at Oak Mountain. Over the span of a month, boys soccer coach David DiPiazza, baseball coach Derek Irons and softball coach Jordan Burson left the school and took a combined seven career state championships with them. The only coach who didn’t leave was girls soccer coach Chris Blight, who also happened to be the athletic director tasked with replacing each of them.
While Burson stepped away from coaching entirely to spend time with his family, DiPiazza and Irons each stayed within the Birmingham metro area as DiPiazza is now the head coach for Vestavia Hills’ boys soccer team while Irons went just down Cahaba Valley Road to serve as an assistant at Briarwood Christian.
The common thread between both of those destinations? Neither are a county-funded public school. Vestavia Hills runs a city school system, while Briarwood is a private school.
The benefits of both are well-trodden territory–in many cases, more resources, better facilities, the ability to coach without teaching and better pay. In the cases of both Vestavia Hills and Briarwood, you wouldn’t even need to move from the Oak Mountain area since the commute is reasonable.
I don’t blame anybody for considering those jobs. When most people are presented with a bigger paycheck for the same job they currently work, they’ll at least hear it out. The same goes for coaches. Sometimes, it’s just business.
However, it’s a problem for county schools when they repeatedly lose out on candidates to city schools and private schools because of that resource gap.
To be clear, this isn’t an indictment on Oak Mountain. OMHS is widely-regarded as one of the top public schools in the entire state, ranked the 17th-best public school and third-best county school in Alabama by Niche. The athletic department under Blight is a tightly-run ship with solid facilities (partly thanks to regular tax contributions by Indian Springs Village), and success in boys basketball and soccer in particular have made those programs destinations for top coaches.
The problem is when it comes down to dollars and cents, Oak Mountain is being outgunned by the biggest 7A city schools in trying to keep their top talent. The same goes for Calera, Chelsea and Helena in Class 6A as they share a region with a pair of city schools in Spain Park and Pelham.
True equality will always be impossible in a free market, especially one where cities like Mountain Brook, Homewood and Vestavia Hills have a wealth of property tax income and other revenue sources to draw from.
I’m also not suggesting the county schools pick up their ball and go home to form their own league. While there are inconsistencies when county schools, city schools and private schools each play each other in the AHSAA, I’ve always believed that such diversity is a plus since it allows all the major players in a community to compete against one another for a shared prize, fostering rivalries and sparking excitement.
This is about Shelby County Schools stepping up to make sure its athletic programs have the financial resources to compete against the teams in their regions and classifications. If the county truly wants to hold its own in the race for state championships, one of the best free sources of positive PR, then it needs to provide its schools with the resources to attract the coaches who will win blue maps.
Having talked to multiple coaches off the record, it’s clear that the stipends and other pay elements that Shelby County Schools offers are too uniform and too low to position itself well in a salary battle to keep a coach. And that’s before you get to other benefits that can be negotiated like reduced class-loads and coaching while retired from teaching.
While it may seem like the deck is stacked against Shelby County Schools, there is little stopping the county from trading in its own hand for a more favorable one. Higher pay and better benefits would go a long way toward attracting the championship coaches the programs desire.
Granted, the same can be said about teachers in general, who are underpaid across the board and aren’t immune to chasing better-paying jobs elsewhere. But the added value that coaches provide schools by performing multiple jobs at once and driving in the gate revenue and sponsorship that fuels both the athletic department and school as a whole demands a concentrated approach.
With top-tier athletes throughout Shelby County capable of scholarships and chasing big dreams, we shouldn’t cut them off from the best possible coaches training and preparing them to be the best they can be.
