Virginia Legal Trends and More: For Love or for Money? Golf coach was ‘volunteer’ not entitled to overtime!

For love or for money?
Golf coach was ‘volunteer’ not entitled to overtime

By Peter Vieth
Published: April 11, 2011

Tags: Employment, Federal Courts, Judge Andre M. Davis, Judge Liam O'Grady

James Purdham is a safety and security officer at Hayfield Secondary School in Fairfax County.

For 15 years, he also has served as the golf coach at the school. He handles daily practices; he transports players to and from the golf course, and sometimes, back home if a parent is running late.

His squad has 12 to 16 players. He started a “B” squad so he wouldn’t have to cut anyone.

Purdham got paid an annual stipend of $2,000 for his work.

The pay doesn’t begin to compensate for all that time and effort. But high school coaches, many of whom are paid stipends like Purdham, spend thousands of hours on their teams because they love kids, they love sports and they embrace the opportunity to teach and influence young people.

However, when the mortgage comes due or the coach has to feed his own family, that dedication and passion for helping kids conflicts with the coach’s own personal needs.

Whether to pay more than a stipend for coaching work is a dilemma that has vexed school boards across the country. Local governments and schools face budget cutbacks and a tight economy just as private businesses do.

Employees who want to get paid for extra work have been filing overtime-pay claims against both public and private employers.

In a new case involving a Fairfax high school golf coach, a federal appeals court has closed the door on the effort to get overtime pay for hourly-pay school employees who coach student athletic teams.

It’s a legal decision in a lawsuit brought by Purdham that addresses the tension between duty to others and duty to self, between volunteer work and compensated work, between love and money.

The central legal issue is whether the coaches are working as employees deserving pay or as volunteers. And on that issue, Purdham lost, in part because his own dedication and concern were used to define him as a big-hearted volunteer.

For three years, Purdham and other Fairfax County hourly-paid school coaches received overtime pay for their coaching work. The county’s short-lived largess stemmed from “an abundance of caution” in light of litigation against other school districts based on the requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Purdham and other coaches received retroactive overtime payments for their coaching from 2003 to 2005. Along with those payments came announcement of a new policy – no more coaching for hourly (or “non-exempt”) employees like Purdham.

Before that policy could go into effect, the Department of Labor issued a guidance opinion letter on the issue of overtime for school coaches. Based on that letter, the Fairfax school system decided its full-time hourly employees could be safely considered as “volunteers” when they coached student athletic teams. The new policy was rescinded, and Purdham and other non-exempt coaches were back on stipends.

Purdham sued the school board under the FLSA. His efforts to make the suit a class action were rebuffed.

While considering the case, U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady read declarations, or statements, from 18 other Fairfax County coaches, all of whom considered themselves volunteers, at least in part.

One of the declarations is illustrative: T.J. Dade, a retired Washington police officer who now works as a security guard at a Fairfax County high school, also served as the girls’ basketball team coach.

During the four-month basketball season, he said he dedicated at least 40 hours a week – the equivalent of another full-time job – to the team.

He drove the team to practices and games and bought the team trophies. When the team stopped at a McDonald’s on the way home late from a game, he was the one who paid for the quarter pounder and fries if one of the players had no money.

For all his time and all those out-of-pocket expenses, he earned a stipend of $3,532.

But he acknowledged, “Frankly, I would volunteer my time as a head coach without the stipend. … You don’t do this for the money.”

An alliance of school board organizations filed an amicus brief, saying school districts would be forced to shut down programs if they had to pay coaches as employees. “[M]any school districts cannot afford to pay coaches regular wages, much less overtime pay,” said Anne Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association.

Some coaches, however, said they do have money in mind when they take on after-work duties, including coaching. In his deposition, Purdham said he coached “in part for the money.” A Fairfax school instructional assistant stated in an affidavit he coached three sports during the year and received about $11,000 in coaching income.

Another golf coach took issue with attempts to describe his job as a “voluntary position.” In a deposition, Chris Tippins said, “the word ‘voluntary,’ it just didn’t make a lot of sense, because I mean to me I feel like I applied for the job. I interviewed for the job. To me it’s a job.”

But that point of view lost out. O’Grady looked to FLSA case law and determined that the Fairfax golf coaches were “volunteers,” not “employees.”

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals took a similar view in Purdham v. Fairfax County School Board (VLW 009-3-668), in a unanimous panel opinion by Judge Andre M. Davis.

“[T]his case presents a classic example of an individual who is motivated, in significant part, by humanitarian and charitable instincts,” Davis wrote.

Purdham’s own dedication as a coach seemed to undermine his efforts to paint the job as an economic choice.

“Purdham is motivated by his long-standing love of golf and his dedication to his student athletes. He prefers coaching over obtaining a part-time job because it is a ‘lifestyle choice’ to coach; coaching young golfers provides him with ‘satisfaction,’” Davis said.

Purdham said he was available to his players around the clock, receiving text messages at the dinner table and driving players home when their parents were late or unable to pick them up. He also described work he did during the off-season, “answering e-mails, phone calls, and text messages relating to coaching and meeting with college recruiters.”

All the coaches’ declarations also influenced the court’s thinking. It is the culture of high school athletics for the coaches to consider themselves as volunteers, Davis wrote.