One day can make a difference

Sporting News, The, May 26, 1997 by Richard Lapchick

With the attention surrounding the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's breaking into major league baseball, it is easy to forget that Robinson was first an incredible student athlete at UCLA. In fact, baseball's historic anniversary coincided with the 10th anniversary of the founding of National Student-Athlete Day. No one epitomizes the qualities of the noble student athlete better then Jackie Robinson.

National Student-Athlete Day (NSAD) honored those who not only play their sport with distinction but those who also are good students and contribute to their community. The day is co-sponsored by the National Consortium for Academics and Sport, the NCAA and Northeastern University Center for the Study of Sport in Society. More than 150,000 high schools won awards for having a student athlete who met these criteria, and national award-winners were welcomed to the White House in April.

We celebrate NSAD to help focus on the issues confronting us while we celebrate all the great things of sports and those who play it. This year, the theme was hearing end the role student athletes can play in bringing people together.

In thinking of healing, perhaps no issue is greater than fulfilling the second half of Jackie Robinson's dream: that sports not only affords people the opportunity to play the game, but also to manage and run it after their playing careers.

Colleges escape the scrutiny of professional sports. We read countless stories on the fact that no blacks were hired for any of the 10 head coaching vacancies in the NFL after the 1996 season. The story was the same in major league baseball. Of the 25 managerial changes since the end of the 1995 season, not one black was hired.

But colleges have an even worse record. After the 1996 football season, there were 24 openings for a head coach in Division I. The Rev. Jesse Jackson threatened action after the first 20 positions were filled out by whites. New Mexico State hired the only black head coach out of the 24 head coaching changes. Basketball has done better, but the rest of college sports are woeful Fewer than 3.9 percent of all college head coaches are black. Fewer than 5 percent of all directors of athletics, their assistants and associate directors are people of color.

The fact that so few staff, faculty and other students on campus look like black student athletes impacts on their potential to graduate as they feel less welcome on our campuses. Emerge magazine prints an annual list of the 50 schools with the worst graduation rates for black male athletes.

To elude Emerge's 1997 basketball list, you merely had to have a graduation rate of 18 percent. Of the 50 schools on the list, 23 did not graduate a single black athlete through four straight years.

These stories unfortunately demonstrate the depth of racial problems in American sports and how hard it is for blacks and other minorities to obtain the promises that were made to them. Once again, sports teaches us lessons in life. But when will the lessons be complete?

Jesse Robinson, Jackie's grandson, will enroll at UCLA this fall as a student athlete. We will not fulfill his grandfather's dream for America until we first recognize the depth of America's racial problems in and out of sports. Jackie Robinson believed in the rainbow of America's people living peacefully and respectfully together. Will another 50 years pass before we can celebrate that part of Jackie's dream? Our children--and Jackie's grandson--cannot afford for us to wait.

Every year, let's use National Student-Athlete Day as a day we can dream about the treasures we have and about the problems we have to overcome.

Richard Lapchick is director for Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society and a regular columnist for THE SPORTING NEWS.