Coaches’ Salaries

* Your Sept. 19 editorial, “Ensuring Fair Play For Women and Men,” fails to address what should be the sole criterion in determining salary for any collegiate coaching job--pay for performance.

Pay for college coaches should be based on won-loss records and the amount of revenue the team generates for the university. It’s that simple.

Men’s football and most men’s basketball coaches are the highest paid because the monies they bring in fund the rest of the athletic programs. Revenue generation and a winning program are the two things on which any university places the greatest emphasis. Only when that emphasis changes should the basis on which pay is determined be changed to other criteria.

The two cases you cite where a women’s coach earns as much as a men’s coach in the same sport (Virginia and Stanford) are not due to Title IX but the fact that Debbie Ryan and Tara VanDerveer have built programs that are among the best in the nation and draw paying crowds equal to or larger than the men’s basketball programs at those schools.

The NCAA needs to look beyond alleged sex discrimination and base the pay of coaches on measurable objective criteria. Won-loss records and the amount of revenue a team generates cannot be disputed in a court of law.

STEVE GOULD

Tustin