What is Mark Prosser’s salary? Details from the Winthrop basketball coach’s contract
Winthrop’s new men’s head basketball coach is making plans to stay for a while.
Mark Prosser has committed to spending the next five years at the Rock Hill university, per the coach’s contract obtained by The Herald through a Freedom of Information Act request. He signed the agreement July 1 and will make $210,000 per year in base salary through June 30, 2026.
“We’re obviously happy to get this done, and we’re thrilled that Mark and his family are here, and we’re excited that he’s our basketball coach,” Winthrop interim athletic director Hank Harrawood told The Herald in an interview on Thursday.
The new AD added that by the time he transitioned into his new role, after his former colleague Ken Halpin announced his move to Purdue, the contract was “pretty much done.” Prosser was hired in early April, but finalizing the contract took a few months, a happenstance that is “not atypical” in college basketball, Harrawood said.
“We’re happy that it’s done,” Prosser told The Herald Thursday morning. “I think I might’ve been over the top, but I meant it every time I said it in that press conference — that this is where we want to be. It’s a place where we want to be as a family, as a staff, and hopefully our student-athletes feel the same way as they come through the program.”
The Eagles’ new head coach is a former Winthrop assistant who earned his first Division I head coaching gig at Western Carolina in 2018 and stayed there for three seasons. Prosser is now replacing his old boss, Pat Kelsey, who spent nine years in Rock Hill before moving on to College of Charleston.
Kelsey left the Eagles’ program in mint condition for Prosser: Winthrop boasted one of the longest winning streaks in all of college basketball for a majority of last season and concluded 2020-21 with its second NCAA tournament berth in as many years. Several contributors from last year’s Big South championship team returned to campus this summer, too — including rising juniors with starting experience Chase Claxton, Russell Jones Jr. and big man DJ Burns.
Mark Prosser bonus possibilities
The 18-page contract, signed by Harrawood and interim university president George Hynd as well as Prosser, states that the new coach is eligible for performance bonuses in addition to his base pay — almost all of which were the same for Kelsey in his final Winthrop contract, which was signed Dec. 2020.
Among those bonuses:
▪ A $10,000 bonus for the basketball team’s selection and appearance in the NCAA tournament. The bonus is to be paid to Prosser within 30 days or as soon as reasonably possible after the last game of the team’s season.
▪ A $15,000 bonus for each win in the NCAA tournament.
▪ A $1 bonus for each men’s basketball home ticket sold above a baseline of 11,151 tickets. For reference, in a normal 15-home-games-a-year season, that 11,151 “baseline” averages to just over 743 tickets a game — and the Winthrop Coliseum seats 6,100 people. (The bonus is limited to $10,000 in any one season.)
Prosser is also eligible for academic performance bonuses any year in which he coaches an entire season, the contract states.
▪ He can earn $2,000 if the team earns an average grade point average of 3.0 or higher, and he can earn $1,000 if the team’s APR, or academic progress rate as calculated by the NCAA, is above 980 in any single academic year or “above 970 on a multi-academic year, three-year average.” (From 2017 to 2019 — the most up-to-date records available in the NCAA database — the Winthrop men’s basketball program recorded APR scores of 948, 957 and 971.)
Similarly, Prosser can be penalized for poor team academic performance, the document shows.
▪ Any performance bonus amount will be reduced by $2,000 in any year in which the team’s GPA is below a 2.75. It can be further reduced by an additional $1,000 in any year in which the team’s APR is below 950 or below 940 on a three-year average. The maximum amount of bonus reduction in a year is $4,000.
In all, the new coach could earn a maximum of $248,000 in 2021-22 if he hit all the academic performance and ticketing targets and wins an NCAA tournament game.
One difference between Prosser and Kelsey contracts
Prosser’s contract — from its performance bonus options, to its academic performance thresholds and more — shares remarkable structural similarities with Kelsey’s final contract at Winthrop.
There’s one notable difference, however: Kelsey had hefty retention bonuses.
Kelsey was eligible to receive a maximum of “two annual retention bonuses of $25,000 each for each contract year” of the agreement. In other words, if Kelsey remained head coach on the first day of NCAA sanctioned practice for the upcoming basketball season, he’d be paid in separate installments of $25,000 on Nov. 16 and Jan. 16.
Prosser has no such stipulation in his contract. That said, neither did Kelsey when he first arrived at Winthrop in 2012. Retention bonuses were added to the coach’s later deals (and funded solely by donor money) once Kelsey’s success starting drawing interest from other coaching destinations, including UMass in 2017.
Kelsey’s base salary in his final year at Winthrop was $247,150 per year, The Herald previously reported.
Cell phone, benefits, camps
Here are four final notes from Prosser’s contract:
Prosser gets “standard fringe benefits” (retirement, medical and life insurance) offered by the University to its employees.
He also is entitled to a “car allowance” of $500 a month — which is to be used for automobile repairs, maintenance, operating costs and the like.
Winthrop provided him with a cell phone.
Prosser is also, per the agreement, allowed to conduct summer basketball camps in which he retains all the income after paying the university “appropriate but reasonable expenses.”
The coach said he’s been encouraged by what he’s seen on the court this past spring and summer, from both returning guys and every one of the team’s five transfers. Winthrop’s first official practice is set for next month.
This story was originally published August 12, 2021 at 3:24 PM.
.jpeg)