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Coaching demands long hours, low pay

Despite working at least 40 extra hours a week for roughly $2.76 an hour, Countryside football coach Joe Ionata won't give up what he loves to do.

By JOHN SCHWARB

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 9, 2001

Joe Ionata

Game days are the longest.

On Fridays, Joe Ionata is at school before 7 a.m. He has to be to have quiet time before the biggest day of the week begins. He will get home 16 hours later, then head back to school by 8 a.m. Saturday to break down videotape for the next Friday night.

Yet there is nothing he'd rather do.

To best understand the immense time commitment that defines a high school coach, take a look at the most glorified, stressed, admired and second-guessed of the breed, the football coach.

At Countryside in Clearwater, Ionata is head football coach, essentially a second full-time job to accompany his regular duties as a driver's education instructor at the school. Coaching consistently ignores the five o'clock whistle, comes home with him at night and never takes fall weekends off.

Its salary, as a lump sum, is a joke. Taken as an hourly rate, it's downright laughable. And for a single 35-year-old, it hardly leaves any time to be, well, a single 35-year-old.

Still, there's nothing Ionata would rather do.

He tried not coaching, for six months shortly after college. It didn't work.

"I had to get right back into it," said Ionata, a 1984 Dunedin grad. "I was miserable."

Armed with a desktop calendar, Ionata outlined the 2001 season, his third at the school. It started Monday and is guaranteed to last until mid-November. Or late November, if he is lucky. December if he is blessed.

Most fans know about some of a coach's in-season duties, from after-school practices to the Friday nights, but there is more. Much more. For Ionata, the coaching week also includes:

• Two hours of game planning from home each evening, Mondays through Wednesdays.
• Tuesday night booster meetings (twice a month).
• Seven-hour Saturday meetings with assistant coaches to break down film and prepare for the next opponent.
• Five-hour Sunday tape sessions at home.

Adding those to the 14 hours he spends preparing for and conducting weekly practices, and the 10-hour Fridays, Ionata puts 42 hours into a game week. With Countryside's 12 games in 2000 (10 regular season, two playoff), his total is roughly 504 hours. Or just plain rough.

"The hardest thing is that I'm doing two full-time jobs at the same time," Ionata said. "From 6:45 in the morning until 9 o'clock when you go to bed, it's school, football, school, football. That's where the nerves fray at both ends."

Today, Ionata's nerves are fine. But that doesn't mean football responsibilities have subsided. From now until the first game kicks off, he'll amass nearly the same amount of hours he puts in during the season.

With off-season weight training, preseason staff meetings, countywide coaches' meetings and, dare a coach forget, the boiling-hot, two-a-day summer practices, the job rarely lets up.

In all, Ionata's coaching year will add up to about 1,000 hours. Given his $2,758 coaching supplement, provided by the county to all head football coaches (those with several years at one school get slightly more), that is $2.76 an hour.

The money, of course, is not the point. But it gives the young coach pause.

"I go back and forth all the time, I really do," Ionata said. "I'm now starting to see my friends, guys I went to college with, really get in the high income brackets. You're talking at the drop of a hat, they can fly to Vegas for a weekend, and they're trying to talk you into it. ..."

Ionata does not finish the thought, but the thought finishes itself: While time and money are never in abundance, the benefits are.

He does not visit his friends at their workplaces, but they come visit him. Every Friday night.

"They're making as much in a month as you do in a year, then at the same time they're always asking me about football, they tell me how cool it is and say, "I wish I could do that,"' Ionata said. "You realize there's so much more to it."

There is nothing else he'd rather do.

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