Record on minority hiring is getting worse, not better

Sporting News, The, June 19, 2000 by Mark Blaudschun

The report came out last month. A study of athletic personnel at NCAA member institutions revealed that there has been virtually no change in the hiring of minorities for key athletic positions. Simply stated, minority coaches and senior administrators are as scarce now as they were 10 years ago.

And that is sad news.

Minority hiring has been an issue for years. College basketball got past its lily-white atmosphere a generation ago, and the game has survived and thrived. Together, college football and basketball constitute a billion-dollar enterprise that just keeps growing. The majority of male athletes who participate in Division I-A football are black. But the men who coach them, and the people who run their athletic departments, generally are not.

Look at the major conferences around the country, and you see precious few black faces in head coaching jobs. You see even fewer in senior administrative jobs such as athletic director.

The latest NCAA report shows that the overall increase in minority hirings in the past five years was a minuscule 0.3 percent. And if you break it down by position, minorities who held the position of athletic director declined by 7.5 percent from 1995 through 1999. That's significant.

The Big East, for example, does not have a black head coach. Nor does it have a black athletic director. Look at the ACC. Only Wake Forest has a black head coach, Jim Caldwell. Athletic directors? None.

There are only a half-dozen black head coaches in Division I-A in 2000: Caldwell, Stanford's Tyrone Willingham, Michigan State's Bobby Williams, Oklahoma State's Bob Simmons, New Mexico State's Tony Samuel and Louisiana-Lafayette's Jerry Baldwin. The problem is even worse on the assistant coach level, where the percentage of black assistant coaches actually has decreased.

Meanwhile, the frustration among black coaches and administrators is rising. "The continued efforts we've made just seem to produce the same results," says Charles Whitcomb, chairman of the NCAA's Minority Opportunities and Interests Committee and the faculty athletics representative at San Jose State. "Either people aren't taking the report seriously or the efforts just aren't being made to identify ethnic minorities for the leadership positions in athletics."

There are qualified black administrators and coaches out there who are ready to step in and do the job. But in one sense, the way things work in college athletics these days is no different than it was a generation ago. Those who do the hiring tend to hire people they know or have learned about through friends. And so, when it comes to hiring minority coaches, the talent pool may be deep, but it is not widely recognized. That problem can be alleviated to some degree if colleges hire more minority athletic directors.

But what really needs to happen is that those in positions of authority show some guts and take a chance. For an athletic director, that is risky because the coaching vacancies in most cases are at schools where the team had a losing record. And with the money from television and bowl games increasing each year, there isn't much patience among administrators at big-time programs to hire and train apprentice coaches. So, a Catch-22 develops, and the same coaches get recycled.

There are generally 10 to 12 openings at major Division I-A schools in every two-year cycle. Sometimes there are more. If the minority hiring situation is to improve, athletic administrators must examine the entire talent pool before deciding on a new coach. They'll find some strong minority candidates who should be more than just candidates. They should be head coaches.

When the next report on minority hiring comes out in 2005, the numbers had better be better than the ones we see now.

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