What Do Players Earn In The Premier Lacrosse League? (2022)

This article takes a deep dive into salaries and additional income of players in the Premier Lacrosse League.

Although the PLL doesn’t publish individual contract details, Paul Rabil and others have released general figures in interviews.

We’ve used all these numbers to analyse the likely salary ranges from rookies to All-Stars. We’ve also looked at all the income sources for PLL players.

Table of Contents

How Do PLL Players Earn Their Income?

Their entire compensation comes from several sources. We’ll review each in turn:

Playing contract agreed with their head coach
Brand sponsorships
Coaching roles at schools or universities
Coaching roles through private camps and clinics
Employment outside of lacrosse *

Plenty of players are also employed in the private sector, especially in financial or real estate roles.

You may be thinking that this shouldn’t be included here because its not related to their playing careers. We’ll get into that in a later section, and you can make up your own mind.

Minimum, Average, And Maximum Salaries

The PLL has stated that the minimum league contract is $25,000 for the season.

More recently, Paul Rabil commented in an interview that $35,000 is the average.

Of course, an average can represent a wide range of salaries. So, let’s start at the lowest end.

Minimum contracts and college draft bonuses

$25,000 is the entry-level salary for draft picks and undrafted selections in their rookie year.

The top four college draft picks get a tiered bonus that puts them above the $25K minimum.

Here are the figures for 2022, going down from the first pick to the fourth.

Player	College	Club	Contract
Logan Wisnauskas	Maryland	Chrome	$30,000
Chris Gray	North Carolina	Atlas	$28,500
Arden Cohen	Notre Dame	Redwoods	$27,000
Matt Moore	Virginia	Archers	$26,000

Lower end contracts

We can also expect more experienced players who weren’t in high demand from other clubs to be on or near the base contract.

Kyle Press is a great example of tenacity. He joined Atlas in 2022 with three years of professional lacrosse under his belt. But I doubt that his contract was more than the first choice college draft pick that season.

Press went into the MLL in 2019 the last draft pick. When the two leagues merged in 2021, he wasn’t selected for the entry draft pool. Many players would have given up on a professional career at that point.

But Kyle Press kept at it. Eventually, Atlas took him through waivers. The player wasn’t in a strong negotiating position. We expect that his contract was on or near to the minimum salary.

Maximum salaries

Every head coach in the PLL has a maximum cap on the total amount they can spend on player salaries.

The figure varies with some circumstances, but the absolute maximum is $735,000 per season. Some clubs have a little less to play with.

Each club has about twenty-five players on their roster. Some carry a few more.

Let’s imagine that there wasn’t a base contract of $25K. Instead, every player on the roster gets the same salary. Dividing the cap by 25 players gives us an average of $29,400K.

That’s below the stated league average of $35K.

You may be thinking that the numbers work when we consider that clubs have about four college drafts on their roster on the entry-level contract.

But what about Redwoods with their seven All-Stars from the 2021 season? What about Archers and Whipsnakes, each with six 2021 All-Stars on their rosters?

Remember, there’s a salary cap.

So, if a club paid six All-Stars $50K each and had four college draft rookies on $25K each, that would leave $335K for the other fifteen players on a typical roster.

Divided evenly, that would put those fifteen players a few K below the PLL minimum salary. So, those numbers don’t work.

Salary ranges

Every club has a different configuration of rookies, All-Stars, veterans, and guys in their second or third year who other clubs would love to poach.

We crunched the numbers for each of the PLL clubs to get realistic figures for their rosters. Then we averaged them to get ranges for the entire league.

If you want a closer look at individual players, check out the articles on the club. In the rest of this article, we’ll go with the general ranges across the PLL.

How Much Do Players Earn In The PLL?

The highest-paid players in the Premier Lacrosse League earn from $35-$38K per season.

Draft picks receive a base contract of $25K.

Veterans who were not in demand from other clubs are on or near the base contract.

Experienced players who regularly make game-day rosters earn from $27-30K per season.

Monthly wage

These figures may seem low but remember that this is for a season that is about five and a half months.

I’ve put the pro-rata monthly equivalent of the top end of these ranges in the table below.

Status	Annual ($)	Monthly ($)
Rookies	25,000	4,545
Developing	27,000	4,909
Senior	30,000	5,455
All-Stars	38,000	6,909

Who are the highest-paid players?

When players sit down with the coach to negotiate their contract, the guys with the best leverage are the All-Stars from the previous season.

We expect their club wages to be a minimum of 35 thousand dollars.

Aside from this, we can measure how a club values their top players by looking at who they appoint as team captains. Most teams in the league have two, while some have three.

As they have extra off-field duties, it stands to reason that the captaincy comes with bonus income.

We estimate that captains who were also All-Stars make the maximum salary of $38K.

If you want to know who got the gongs, check out this list of All-Stars by club.

How does the PLL afford player wages?

You may be wondering if the gate receipts and television revenue for the league are enough to cover the wages paid by the clubs.

The answer is that they’re not.

However, the PLL has some very wealthy investors. You can get the detail in our overview of owners of the Premier Lacrosse League.

Sponsorships And Brand Advertising

We can’t put exact figures on brand deals and sponsorship in the PLL.

We estimate that they vary from $3-10K for dedicated lacrosse gear brands and up to $20K for the big sports brands like Adidas.

Our articles on player income at specific clubs lists brand deals for players within those clubs. I’ll give a taster here.

Myles Jones picked up a brand deal from Adidas when he was the first choice pick in the MLL in 2015. He continues to have a high profile.

Jones is also sponsored by ECD Lacrosse.

Tom Schreiber is a shrewd operator who has also negotiated deals with several brands:

Warrior & New Balance (equipment and clothing)
Motive Pure (sports drinks)
Lax Sniper (up-and-coming equipment manufacturer)

The third brand is smaller than the others but has ambitions. They’ve also appointed Schreiber as an advisory board member.

Interestingly, several companies don’t lock players into exclusive access. They are happy to play nice with each other, which certainly makes things better for the players.

Epoch sponsors Matt Rambo, but he also has a helmet deal with STX.

Ryan Drennan also gets the benefits of dual equipment deals. He gets helmet sponsorship from STX while also working with East Coast Dyes (ECD).

But its not just sports brands who are interested in PLL players. I was looking at LinkedIn and a video popped up in my feed of a guy rocking Bose ear pods. It was none other than Mike Erhardt!

Coaching At Schools And Colleges

Some players take voluntary roles as part-time coaches at their school or college.

But plenty of other PLL players are in paid positions as assistant coaches at prestigious universities. I checked a few job listings and the going rate for an assistant lacrosse coach is $30K per year.

This may not be them all:

Chris Aslanian at Princeton
Ryder Garnsey at Notre Dame
Marcus Holman at Utah
Jesse Bernhardt at Maryland
Tucker Durkin at Drexel
Jacob Richard at Marquette in Wisconsin
JD Colarusso at Marist College in New York
Troy Reh at Long Island University
Charlie Hayes at Detroit Mercy
Matt Whitcher at York College in Pennsylvania
Kyle Bernlohr at Cleveland State
Mike Chanenchuk at Stony Brook in New York

Coaching Camps And Clinics

Outside the academic year, plenty of players provide lacrosse clinics in the summer.

Some players run their own clinics, which is probably more lucrative but takes a bit of work.

Own-brand camps and clinics

Eric Law has his own limited liability company (Elaw Lacrosse LLC) providing private coaching.

Jake Bernhardt has the Bernhardt Lacrosse camps that run in the Florida area.

Joseph Nardella founded the Faceoff Factory to provide private clinics.

Jerry Ragonese co-founded a company with a rather similar name: the Face Off Academy.

Hired by camps and clinics

Other players are hired by companies that plan and manage clinics across North America.

Mike Chanenchuk is one of several coaches at Spotlight Lacrosse, who run camps across the country.

Justin Anderson works for Adrenaline Lacrosse, a company that runs camps and clinics in the west.

Asher Nolting coaches with 3D Lacrosse, while Marcus Holman coaches with with Pro Lacrosse Camps.

That’s just to mention a few examples. Many other players also do this.

Employment Outside The Lacrosse World

Players in the PLL are employed by the club for under six months of the year. They also don’t train full-time during the season.

The standard schedule is to take a Friday off for travel and training. That means that employers can take on players for a four-day work week.

There are plenty of lacrosse players who have well-paid jobs in finance and real estate. I’ve picked out a few of the more recognizable companies:

Sergio Perkovic, investment analyst at Goldman Sachs
Christian Cuccinello, management consultant at Accenture
Max Adler, financial analyst at Walt Disney
Brendan Curry, real estate analyst at Wells Fargo
Dylan Molloy, senior underwriter at Chubb

It’s fair to say that many players get their foot in the door as interns through their contacts and connections in the lacrosse world. That’s why I’ve included external employment in this article.

But it should also be pointed out that a few players buck the trend.

Jake Froccaro owns eight Mexican food eateries across New York.

Kieran McArdle is a PE teacher in a school in Washington Heights, New York.