MSU hockey head coach Ron Mason is scheduled to receive a roughly $20,000 raise to his annual base salary at the MSU Board of Trustees meeting Friday.
The Board will vote to increase his salary from $153,215 to $173,215. Mason’s salary increase is one of three payroll items on the agenda.
MSU Trustee Joel Ferguson said he would pay Mason even more than the proposed increase.
“He is the No. 1 coach in the country,” Ferguson said. “We will never be able to give him what he is worth.”
Mason is in his 23rd year as MSU’s head coach and is college hockey’s winningest coach with a 897-371-79 overall record and a 608-261-69 record at MSU. He said Athletics Director Clarence Underwood, MSU President M. Peter McPherson and Vice President for Finance and Operations Fred Poston worked out the deal with him “a little while back.”
“It’s for trying to keep up with the national picture,” Mason said. “I’m one of the top-paid guys, no question about it.
“I wasn’t in there saying ‘Hey, I need a raise.’ It was one of those things where it was kind of a mutual thing to look at it and see where you’re at.”
MSU Trustee David Porteous said he couldn’t comment specifically on the pay raise until Friday’s meeting, but he has high praise for Mason.
“He is the greatest college hockey coach in the country,” he said. “I believe that Michigan State University is very fortunate to have someone with his commitment. He is a coach who stresses not just the hockey side of his sport but the academic side.”
Mason’s proposed raise comes at a time when the university’s budget is under the microscope for cutbacks.
The board awarded McPherson a 3 percent raise in September and a 5 percent overall increase to MSU’s faculty, expected this month.
But the university cut $5.5 million from the 2001-02 budget and repealed its self-imposed tuition guarantee to raise undergraduate tuition 8.9 percent in response to low state appropriation.
