Race and Ethnicity: Minority Numbers in Coaching

On April 8th and 10th in class, we discussed the topic area of Race and Ethnicity in regards to sports. We defined some basic terms that deal with race and ethnicity, discussed African Americans and sport participation, and some statistics on how African Americans are represented in the major sports.

Prejudice - An expression of bigotry. Judging without knowledge of the facts.
Stereotypes - fixed ideas about a group.
Discrimination - Treating someone differently from others.
Race - Social category constructed and accepted by society to describe members with genetic similarity.
Ethnic Group - a socially distinct population that shares a way of life and is committed to the ideas, norms, and things that constitute that way of life.
Minority Group - members share common group characteristics, and suffer from discrimination.

Sport Participation and African Americans

• Prior to the 1950's, African Americans faced a segregated sport system
• African Americans participate in a very limited range of sports
• African American men and women are under represented in most sports

Statistics 

• NBA - 87% are African American
• NFL - 70% are African American
• MLB - 9.8% are African American

African Americans do not only face challenges when it comes to playing sports, but they also face challenges becoming coaches of high level sports. Richard E. Lapchick wrote an article in volume 16, issue 44 in Street and Smith's Sports Business Journal

 that highlighted the problem with African Americans being under represented as NCAA coaches as well as other positions. In the article, Richard states that among 125 top FBS teams that were surveyed, 89% of the presidents, 85% of the athletic directors, and 100% of the conference commissioners are white males. So overall, 89% of the 382 leadership positions on the 125 FBS schools are held by whites. The article also contains some statistics on the make-up of Division I NCAA basketball teams. About 56% of male student athletes on basketball teams are African American, and 48% for women. About 23% of the men's basketball coaches are African American, which is an increase of 4.4% from last year. About 20% of women's basketball coaches are African American, which is an increase of 6% from last year. These statistics show that the numbers are heading in the right direction for equal representation, but there is still a long way to go.

Some final statistics from the article:

• Division I,II, and III all men's sports head coaching positions
• 86% Division I - white
• 88% Division II - white
• 92% Division III - white
• Division I,II, and III all women's sports head coaching positions
• 85% Division I - white
• 88% Division II - white
• 92% Division III - white

University of Connecticut head men's basketball coach Kevin Ollie

Connecting to the text, Jay Coakley discusses race and ethnicity on page 276 of his book Sports in Society:  Issues and Controversies. Race and Ethnicity are terms that the average person often confuse with each other. Coakley defines race as, "a population of people who are believed to be naturally or biologically distinct from other populations. He defines ethnicity as, "a cultural heritage that people use to identify a particular population." Another term that Coackley defines that the Sports Business Journal deals with is minority. Coakley defines minority as, "a socially identified population that suffers disadvantages due to systematic discrimination and has a strong sense of social togetherness based on shared experiences of past and current discrimination. It is important to understand these and the other terms that we defined in class to fully understand an article about the issues that African Americans are facing in head coaching positions in college athletics.