Shopping For A New Coach?

According to a story at USA TODAY, coaches aren’t the only ones making money off the rising tide of their salaries.

Winthrop Intelligence is a year-old company that uses open-records requests to create a database of what every Division I head coach and assistant in every men’s and women’s sport at every public college is paid – then sells that data to athletics departments.

Winthrop says its online subscription service can save schools money by allowing them to see real numbers for what other schools are paying their coaches. That gives athletics directors leverage in contract negotiations. Coaches have gained traction in those discussions in recent years, in part by obtaining representation from agents, some of whom have other coaches as clients.

All of the information Winthrop gathers is publicly available but time-consuming and expensive to gather.

“We couldn’t do it,” Stanford deputy athletics director Ray Purpur says. “There would be too much information.”

Athletics directors who buy the service, for sale since last fall, can use it to look for job candidates – potentially saving time and money on searches – or find the going rate during conversations with a coach about a contract extension.

Editor note: Here is a perfect example of a business built on information that is publicly available, yet no one had aggregated it into a usable database.

Photo by je1196.

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