Sports: Few Black Coaches in Div. 1 Football

hbarber — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 12:25:11 +0000

Few Black coaches are in Div. 1 football. It looks like former NBA star Charles Barkley was onto something when he suggested that racism had kept his alma mater, Auburn University, from hiring a winning football coach (Buffalo University’s Turner Gill) over a losing White coach (Gene Chisik, from Iowa State). As it stands now, there are only four Black head coaches among the 119 major-college football programs. So, in a sport with 50 percent of its players Black, only 3.4 percent of the coaches are Black. Georgia Tech’s basketball coach, Paul Hewitt, who serves as the president of the Black Coaches Association, believes he has a solution for the dearth of Black major-college coaches. He puts the onus on African-American recruits and their families, whom he says should weigh an institution’s commitment to coaching diversity before choosing it. “If the top five defensive linemen and the top five offensive linemen in the country went to play for Randy Shannon at Miami and they won a national championship in two years, watch how fast this thing would change,” Hewitt said. “These kids need to say, ‘If my alma mater doesn’t display a record of hiring people who look like me, why should I go and help them?’

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Sports: Few Black Coaches in Div. 1 Football