New Washington State head coach Matt Leach will earn $125,000 as a base salary in his new gig leading the Cyclones women’s swimming & diving program.
That is an increase from the $110,000 base pay right of retiring head coach Duane Sorenson in 2023, his last fiscal year leading the program, which in itself was the first time his base salary broke into six figures in 27 years leading the program. It’s also about $20,000 more than Leach’s base salary at Washington State.
Leach came to Ames officially on May 1 after six seasons as the head coach at Washington State.
The salary makes Leach among the highest-paid coaches in the country at schools with only a women’s program.
Leach’s contract also come with extra benefits like a vehicle allowance, and athletic performance incentives.
Performance Incentives
Note: 1 week’s pay is approximately $2,400.
Leach has four possible performance incentives for his team’s results in the pool, which are cumulative. That means that if his team wins the NCAA Championship, he receives the bonuses in points 2, 3, and 4.
- Leach will receive 4 week’s pay for his team winning the Big 12 Conference Swimming Championship.
- Leach will receive 1 week’s pay for his team finishing in the Top 25 of the NCAA Swimming Championship.
- Leach will receive 1 week’s pay for his team finishing in the Top 10 of the NCAA Swimming Championship.
- Leach will receive 1 week’s pay for his team winning the NCAA Swimming National Championship.
Iowa State’s outlook in the Big 12 changes dramatically this season with the departure of the University of Texas, the conference’s dominant program for the last decade, to the SEC. Meanwhile, the University of Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah join the conference with women’s swimming programs. Arizona and Arizona State also have new head coaches this season.
Leach most recently spent the last six seasons as the head coach of Washington State, which like Iowa State also is a women’s-only program. While at Washington State, Leach had an NCAA qualifier in each season, with the exception of the COVID cancelation. This past season, Emily Lundgren earned a ‘B’ final swim and finished 14th in the 200 breast in finals. That was the program’s first NCAA finalist since 2007.
Prior to arriving at Washington State in 2018, Leach spent three years at Indiana State where he started the program in 2015 and the team began competing in the 2016-2017 season. Leach was named the 2017-18 Missouri Valley Coach of the Year, the program’s second season ever.
Before starting the program at Indiana State, Leach spent six seasons with Wyoming, including the final four as associate head coach working primarily with the sprinters. Leach began his coaching career at LSU as a graduate assistant and then spent two years with LSU as a volunteer assistant.
Leach was a student-athlete at Indiana University where he graduated in winter 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in environmental management. He earned his graduate degree in environmental planning and management from LSU in 2007.
Interesting to me this is considered a significant pay bump. I understand there’s not a ton of money in coaching, but for this to be one of the higher level jobs most coaches may ever reach and your talking about barely a 6-figure base salary is pretty wild.
Might be a bigger signal to swimming to start pushing for a for-profit approach so people taking on this much responsibility, a long with their staff can actually make some decent money.
Part of the issue is swimming’s steadfast insistence to not do things to make people care more about it.
But part of it is perspective. Swimming is a sport where a huge portion of the demo can look at a $125k annual base, with a university pension + benefits and big bonus opportunities, and say “that’s not decent money.”
Iowa State head coach is a job that’s, IDK, 100th or 125th in the pecking order in the just the United States in a pretty niche industry? An industry with only a million customers, give or take?
Trying to think of an analogous industry/position. Closest I can come up with is the head manager of a big supermarket chain. Depending on… Read more »
I’m happy ISU is putting in serious money to swimming.
I hope progress is also made towards a better pool than Beyer. That would help attract more top talent.
What happened to long-time associate head Kelly Nordell? She had been at Iowa State for like 15 years …..
She was let go. The last I heard she was assessing her options for the future.
“New Washington State head coach Matt Leach will earn $125,000 as a base salary in his new gig leading the Cyclones women’s swimming & diving program.”
DeSorbo at UVa who is coming off of multiple national championships only makes 15 grand more than Iowa State. Good for Iowas state (even though it’s still not enough) but if I’m DeSorbo I’m calling my boss yesterday and renegotiating my contract because he should be making 250,000 /year at a minimum.