College of Maine athletic director Ken Ralph has a tall order when he and his search committee look to rent a brand new ladies’s ice hockey coach.
Not solely does he have to interchange former head coach Richard Reichenbach and his prime assistant coach, his spouse, Sara, who each resigned final week for undisclosed causes.
However the brand new coach will probably be one of many lowest paid in Hockey East — and within the nation.
The college intends to lift the wage for the brand new coach to attempt to shut the hole between UMaine and the remainder of the Hockey East colleges. The varsity should make a major funding to carry the wage in step with that of its opponents, as most head teaching positions at UMaine are among the many lowest paid of their respective conferences.
Richard Reichenbach, who was the pinnacle coach for 9 seasons, earned $69,999.96 this previous season.
By comparability, College of New Hampshire coach Hilary Witt made $133,650. She is starting her ninth season this yr.
College of Vermont coach Jim Plumer made $108,771 in his tenth season in Burlington.
The one different state faculty in Hockey East is the College of Connecticut, the place Huskies head coach Chris McKenzie made $96,541 in 2018 and was more likely to be over $100,000 this previous season.
Non-public colleges don’t should disclose salaries.
The wage is a fraction of what UMaine second-year head males’s ice hockey coach Ben Barr makes at $235,000. He’s believed to be one of many the bottom paid males’s coaches in Hockey East, if not the bottom.
UNH head males’s hockey coach Mike Souza made $240,000 final season, which was his fourth behind the Wildcat bench.
Todd Woocroft, in his second season as the lads’s coach at Vermont, earned $277,750.
UConn’s Mike Cavanaugh simply concluded his eighth season with the Huskies and, two months in the past, signed a six-year, $3.58 million contract to stay at UConn.
Most not too long ago, UMaine raised the wage for its head soccer coach place. Jordan Stevens is the varsity’s highest-paid coach at $245,000 per yr, greater than the $153,000 earned by his predecessor Nick Charlton however nonetheless dwarfed by the convention common of roughly $400,000.
Regardless of the discrepancy between the ladies’s and males’s ice hockey head coach salaries, the UMaine ladies’s hockey group has been extra profitable than the lads’s in recent times.
Despite the fact that Richard Reichenbach’s document was 108-155-28 general and 72-117-24 in Hockey East common season play, he guided the Black Bears to berths within the Hockey East semifinals in every of the final three seasons after upsetting greater seeded quarterfinal opponents on the highway.
His groups earned 4 semifinal berths over the previous 5 campaigns.
The boys’s hockey group hasn’t reached the Hockey East semifinals because the 2011-12 season.
Girls’s ice hockey just isn’t a revenue-producer.
Regardless of the ladies’s group’s profitable current playoff runs, the Black Bears averaged solely 212.1 followers per house recreation this previous season. There isn’t any admission price for girls’s ice hockey video games.
That quantity just isn’t uncommon in ladies’s hockey. UMaine’s closest rival, UNH, averaged 381.9 for its 16 common season house video games.
The UMaine males’s group attracted 3,605 per recreation, regardless of ending final in Hockey East.
