Your director of coaching has been with you four seasons. They run your top age group, wrote half the curriculum, and are the reason two families from across town drive past three other clubs to get to your fields. Over the holidays a neighboring school district posts an opening for a physical education teacher and head coach, and your coach sends you a short message asking if you have a few minutes next week.
You already know what the conversation will be about, and you probably have a plan for it: a raise, a better title, maybe a lighter weekend schedule. All of that helps, and none of it touches the part of the district's offer your coach is actually weighing.
That part comes down to size far more than generosity. A district buys health insurance and retirement plans for thousands of people at once, which gets it prices and choices no club with twelve staff can get by asking on its own. Most directors assume a club can't offer that kind of package, but by partnering with the right business, a program can get the same benefits setup a district has, and it changes nearly every line of the comparison your coach is about to make.
Most directors think of an offer as a salary number with some goodwill around it. The coach on the other side of the table sees two columns. One holds what you pay. The other holds everything the district provides that never shows up on a pay stub: health insurance for their family, a retirement plan, dental, vision, life insurance, and someone else handling the paperwork for all of it. Call it the side-by-side, the comparison every full-time staff member with a real alternative is running whether or not you ever see it.
The side-by-side is lopsided before you say a word. Federal labor data from March 2025 shows that 99% of public school teachers can get health insurance through their employer, and 99% can get a retirement plan. At private employers with fewer than 50 people, which describes most youth sports programs, only about half offer either one. Your coach is comparing you to an employer that almost always says yes against a peer group that says yes about half the time.
This is the biggest number in the second column and the one directors underestimate most. The largest annual survey of employer health plans found that in 2025, covering a family cost an average of $26,993 a year. Workers paid about $6,850 of that out of their checks, and the employer paid the rest, roughly $20,000. A coach with a spouse and kids who moves to a district job is picking up something close to that amount every year before salary enters the conversation.
That is why the raise rarely closes the gap. A $4,000 bump is real money to your budget and a real gesture to your coach, while the district's share of family health insurance is roughly five times larger, and it keeps climbing: the same survey found family coverage costs rose 6% in a single year. This is also the line where size matters most, because a club buying as part of a group of thousands is priced on that whole group instead of on its own dozen people.
The district's retirement plan is often the part a coach in their thirties weighs most heavily, because the money they put in now has decades to grow. Public school teachers almost all have one, and full-time state and local government workers overall do too. Without a plan of your own, the best you can offer is advice to open a retirement account on their own, which leaves your coach saving entirely out of their own pay while a friend at the district gets money added by the employer every paycheck. Setting up a plan alone is a project most programs never get to, while getting one through a partner turns it into a choice you make once.
Dental, vision, and life insurance look minor one at a time and add up in the side-by-side. In the same federal data, dental coverage reached 30% of workers at private employers with fewer than 100 people and 70% at employers with 500 or more. Vision and life insurance showed the same kind of gap. That spread tracks size almost exactly, which is the clearest sign that the empty boxes on your side come from buying small rather than from caring less. A coach with kids notices each one.
The last line is one your coach may never mention and you certainly feel. Even when a program finds a way to buy a health plan, someone has to sign people up, answer their questions, handle coverage when a staff member leaves, keep up with state rules, and take the right amounts out of each paycheck. At a program with eight or twelve full-time people, that someone is usually you. A district has a benefits office for this, and the right partner can carry the same work, which removes the reason so many programs leave the benefits column blank.
The instinct is to call an insurance broker, ask for a price on a health plan for your full-time staff, and decide from there. That's a reasonable first step, and it usually produces a number that ends the discussion. Insurers price a small employer on the strength of a small group, so a couple of big medical claims can push next year's price up, and the plan choices tend to be thinner than what a district offers.
The partner from the opening has a name. A professional employer organization, or PEO, is a company that combines the staff of many small businesses into one large group for benefits. In the arrangement, the PEO shares the employer role with you for taxes and benefits, runs payroll and the filings that come with it, and keeps track of the employment rules, while you keep every decision about who you hire, what you pay, and how the program runs.
The effect on keeping people is measurable. Research from the PEO industry's trade group found that businesses using one had staff turnover about 12% lower than similar businesses that didn't, and grew more than twice as fast. The researchers credit much of that to those businesses being more attractive places to work, including offering more benefits.
Signature's partner program with G&A Partners brings that model to youth sports. For programs that qualify, it can open access to health, dental, and vision insurance at the lower rates large employers usually get and a retirement plan for staff, with payroll and tax filings handled for you, workers' comp coverage without a large deposit up front, and an online portal where staff can find their own pay and benefits information. Qualifying programs can also receive an annual sponsorship paid back to the program, sized to headcount. Not every program qualifies, so the first step is to enter your staff numbers in the savings calculator, which takes about a minute with no call required, to see whether your program qualifies and what your estimate looks like. See if your program qualifies →
Before your next contract conversation with a full-time coach or staff member, build the side-by-side yourself on one page. List their salary, then put a dollar figure next to each line in the second column, and pull the competing numbers from the benefits summary your local district publishes for teachers. Leave a blank where you have nothing to offer.
Then read it the way your coach will. A gap that is mostly salary may close with the raise you already planned, while a gap that sits in the second column tells you what they will be weighing next week, and you can decide on your own timeline whether to close it.
One practical system for growing, staffing, and running your program. Free, and written for directors who are short on time.