I'm learning really quickly why coaches jump..

[thouse34]

Started with St Thomas and have built them up into winning the conference almost every season and having a good recruiting class each season yet the offseason discussion with the board goes the same way every time...
"Can we have more money?"
"No, you're doing fine with what you have"
"But you want me to win the conference every year"
"Yup"
"But you don't want to pay anymore for that?"
"Nope"

[jolo240]

Sometimes it's a crapshoot.. I use St. Thomas too, and I now have almost $170k in budget.

It helps to have a good season then asking them.. sometimes the increases are small (around $2k) and sometimes it leaps (I got a $10k increase last season)

A tip to save money in recruiting is to focus more on our local state (in our case, MN) especially if your asst. coaches' salaries are a bit on a high side.

Hope this helps fellow St. Thomas Coach!

[Gary Gorski]

"Can we have more money?"
"No, you're doing fine with what you have"
"But you want me to win the conference every year"
"Yup"
"But you don't want to pay anymore for that?"
"Nope"

Here's a tip that might help - just as the boards operate as they would in the real world you can try to help your cause by doing what people who want budget increases do in the real world. What does that mean? It means spend your entire budget and tell the higher ups you don't have enough because you keep running out. It's definitely not a guarantee that you will get more but it will give you more of a leg to stand on than if you still have plenty of budget left over.

[jlemmen43]

In real life, unless a small program is truly moving up the ranks (like Gonzaga did), it's still super risky for your athletic board to spend a ton more money than normal. For smaller schools,your margins are thinner. When a good coach suddenly sucks or suddenly gets crap for recruits, or is dominated by another rival in the conference, or your talent (staff and players) just leave for greener pastures/opportunites, you are left with disappointment to the fans and donors. and that can't just be fixed by endless money at a small school. So it makes sense that very few smaller schools keep their coaches or keep improving. Your best realistic hope is to do like Murray State did. I believe when a head coach left, a mentor stepped up into the head coach role, and on and on. Eventually they were ranked, then had Morant become a NBA star, and although I dont pay attention anymore, I did see at the Gym that Murray State had a high tournament seed for a mid major.

So for all that rambling, I think its pretty realistic to have a consistent program that isn't ready to take the plunge to stardom. Being a big fish in a small pond definitely has it's perks.