PITTSBURGH (AP) - Before the start of every high school football season, Stacy Robinson goes through a familiar routine.
The head coach at Union High School for the past 18 seasons, Robinson makes it a point to keep an eye on fellow African-Americans trying to break into the head coaching ranks, those going through the same things he did nearly two decades ago.
Robinson believes it’s his responsibility to reach out to these coaches coming along and help them in any small way he can.
Though it’s something he continues to do, the regimen often has a familiar ending, with very few African-Americans getting hired in what can be a bleak landscape for coaches of their race.
“It’s not a surprise to me that this has been going on,” Robinson said.
In a city where the most high-profile coaching figure is an African-American - Mike Tomlin of the Steelers - and in a region that gave birth to the Rooney Rule, which requires NFL teams to interview at least one minority candidate for a head-coaching vacancy, the local pool of high school football coaches is thin on diversity.
In the 2014 season, only 9 of 130 area high schools employed a head coach who is a racial minority (6.9 percent), a number that is significantly lower than in other cities in the region.
It’s a figure former Gateway head coach and current Penn State cornerbacks coach Terry Smith called “embarrassing.” Dr. Richard Lapchick, a University of Central Florida academic who is considered a leading voice for racial issues in sports, said this lack of coaching diversity in high school football is a national problem, but referred to the numbers in Pittsburgh as “stunningly low” and “almost off-the-charts bad.”
Though few consider that overall lack of representation intentional, it nonetheless exists, impacting the lives of the men who find a calling in the sport they love.
“I think it goes unnoticed,” Clairton coach Wayne Wade said. “It’s just been the norm for so long. I wouldn’t say it has anything to do with race or nepotism. It’s just the opportunities aren’t there.”
Familiar quandary
As startling as some view that 6.9 percent figure, it’s part of a much larger picture that paints a unique situation in western Pennsylvania, at least in relation to large cities in the Midwest with a similar demographic base.
In the Cincinnati metropolitan area, where minorities comprise 15.3 percent of the population, compared to 11.2 percent in Pittsburgh, 13.3 percent of high school football head coaches are minorities, nearly double what it is in the WPIAL and City League. In the Columbus, Ohio area, it’s also 13.3 percent. In Indianapolis, it’s 12.9 percent. In Louisville, Ky., which has a minority population of 16.5 percent, it’s 17.9 percent.
Perhaps the most glaring aspect of Pittsburgh’s low minority coaching numbers is that there isn’t a dearth of potential candidates.
A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette survey of local high schools found that 19.2 percent of assistant coaches in the WPIAL and City League are racial minorities. That percentage suggests there are a number of qualified applicants out there who, for one reason or another, aren’t getting hired as head coaches, stuck in the same kind of quandary Wade and Robinson were for many years.
Not only is the percentage of minority head coaches disproportionate to the number of minority assistants in the area, it’s not representative of the players they coach.
The data on assistant coaches is on par with the 18.2 percent of students at 120 area public high schools who are racial minorities, according to Pennsylvania Department of Education records from the 2013-14 academic year. The WPIAL does not keep track of the racial composition of its athletes.
To those who study the role of race in society, there’s a disparity between these different sets of statistics that produces a lucid conclusion.
“Clearly, there’s a bias of some sort going on,” said Dr. Larry Davis, the director of Pitt’s Center on Race & Social Problems. “That goes without saying, to have a number of assistant coaches and not many head coaches. Something’s clearly going on.”
Numbers game
Any question as to why there are so few minority head football coaches in western Pennsylvania does not come with a simple answer, something one might expect for a complex, multi-tiered issue.
Some point to the shrinking of the City League, which has gone from 10 teams in 2003 to six. Three of the area’s nine minority head coaches are at schools in the Pittsburgh Public Schools system.
In an area where more than a few coaches have been in their current role for decades, others bemoan the lack of opportunities for head coaching positions, be it for white or non-white candidates. Even when these long-tenured coaches retire or take jobs elsewhere, one of their assistants often succeeds them, significantly reducing the pool of potential replacements.
There’s also the matter of local school systems and their distinct structure. As opposed to being united under one governing body, the 120 local public high schools are divvied up into 113 school districts. That number of entities could mean that things such as the racial makeup of coaches simply end up going unnoticed.
It could even tie back to the very nature of high school sports.
Unlike the professional and college ranks -where coaches are hired based entirely on their merits for full-time positions - coaching searches in high school football are not so cut and dried.
The PIAA, the state’s governing body for high school athletics, has a laundry list of requirements a coach must fulfill, such as courses on concussion and cardiac arrest protocol, first aid and coaching fundamentals.
Those coaching prerequisites, however, are not exclusive to Pennsylvania. High school athletic associations in Ohio and Kentucky, for instance, have a similarly lengthy list of guidelines for prospective coaches.
The idea remains, though, that these positions are labors of love, jobs that are incredibly time-intensive with little financial incentive. (Many coaches don’t make more than a few thousand dollars per year.) In short, it takes a certain kind of person to want to coach high school football.
“There are so many variables that go into coaching at the high school level that I don’t think that race or gender or anything like that factors into it,” WPIAL executive director Tim O’Malley said. “If you recently research what the PIAA requires for anybody to become involved in coaching at the interscholastic level, why anybody wants to coach today is beyond me.”
There’s also an educational component.
It’s advantageous to hire a coach who works at the school or in the district, as it allows them to be close to their players and be a more constant presence in their lives beyond practices and games.
Some like Robinson wonder if that plays a role.
“If you look at minority head coaches, there’s probably not as many minority teachers, especially male teachers,” he said. “Right away, that limits the opportunities for us.”
As limiting as those factors can be, they theoretically apply to any coaching hopeful, regardless of their skin color. So while those facts provide context, they don’t offer a full explanation.
To some, that 6.9 percent figure and how it compares to similar cities says much more than any possible reason for its existence could.
“People are always looking for excuses, but the reality is that if you want to get a coach of color at the high school level, there are coaches of color available who have the experience and skill set that will be exactly what you’re looking for if you’re open to it,” Lapchick said. “That wouldn’t be true if you’re trying to do it at every school, but certainly at more than 6.9 percent of the schools.”
A study in high school coaching diversity: Does mindset affect hiring?
January 20, 2015 12:00 AM
By Craig Meyer / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The second of two parts
When John Ashaolu told friends and family that he had been hired as the athletic director at Seton-LaSalle High School, the news was often met with surprise.
Though he would ask why they were astonished, he already knew the answer, one that had nothing to do with his qualifications or his soon-to-be employer. It was because Ashaolu, an African-American, was hired for a prominent position at a largely white Catholic school.
Soon enough, he realized that shock he received could be applied to most any other place in the area. When he would attend sporting events or go to conferences with colleagues from different schools, he was almost always confronted with a painful truth - that in his line of work, there were very few people who looked like him.
“It was so blatantly apparent,” said Ashaolu, who no longer works at the school. “When I would go to athletic director meetings, it’s just human nature to see who your peers are and you’re like, ’Wow, OK.’ “
Ashaolu’s experiences weren’t an anomaly; if anything, they were emblematic of a trend that factors into the scarcity of minority coaches in local high school football. Not only are the coaches in Western Pennsylvania overwhelmingly white - in the 2014 season, 9 of 130 local high schools had a minority head football coach (6.9 percent), a figure much lower than it is in similar cities in this region - but so also are athletic directors and principals, two of the figures most involved in coaching searches.
Only 3.9 percent of WPIAL and City League athletic directors are racial minorities, a figure that is identical for principals, according to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette survey. One school - West Shamokin - did not respond to multiple calls inquiring about the race of its principal.
From these figures comes a pressing question - if there are only a handful of minorities with titles of authority at high schools, should it really be a surprise that it’s the same way for football coaches?
“With those low numbers in those key positions, it’s very likely to influence how few African-American coaches or people of color there are in head coaching jobs,” said Dr. Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.
In the eyes of some, that reality extends beyond a handful of employees to the school districts themselves.
Numerous people interviewed for this story expressed skepticism over how receptive schools in predominantly white areas are to hiring a minority coach. Whether or not such prejudice exists, a pessimistic mindset subsists for many minority coaches when pursuing certain jobs, something that can prevent them from applying altogether.
Even for decorated individuals with established reputations such as former Gateway coach Terry Smith - who led the Gators to four WPIAL championship appearances from 2004-09 - that feeling existed.
In a racial discrimination lawsuit he filed against Gateway School District, Smith contended he was “subjected to retaliation and further discrimination, all intended to harass and get him to resign,” according to court documents. Some of those alleged actions included school board members avoiding contact with him, the implementation of stringent hiring practices for volunteer coaches (who had been predominantly black) and, ultimately, making his athletic director position a part-time one, a rare move for what was then a Class AAAA school.
The school district denied those first two claims and noted that the change in Smith’s employment status was a cost-cutting measure that had nothing to do with his race. The two sides reached a settlement last year.
Smith left Gateway in 2013 to become the wide receivers coach at Temple, an embattled exit at least partially prompted by the board’s decision. A little more than a year later, Gateway was able to pry Tom Nola from Clairton, allowing Wayne Wade - an accomplished African-American defensive coordinator who played an integral role in the Bears’ historic 66-game winning streak - to get a long-awaited head coaching opportunity.
Of course, there are examples that counteract this belief that some coaches hold. Mark Adams at Southmoreland, Mark Washington at Moon and Stacy Robinson at Union are African-Americans who lead football teams at schools with mostly homogeneous student bodies.
Still, there’s a prevailing sentiment that not every job that opens up is actually open, a sort of hopelessness that’s hard to shake.
“For one of us to go and say ’We have the credentials and we want to be at the forefront of a (Class AAAA) school,’ I think that’s when everyone involved has to examine themselves and ask ’What if?’ and ’What would we do?’ ” Robinson said. “If you have a quality guy coming through and, say, the minority enrollment at your school is under 5 percent, do you really want a minority to be the face of your program? It’s an easy question and answer until you’re faced with it.”
Mindset shift
Not too long ago, Louisville, Ky., had a problem that reached much greater depths than the current predicament in Pittsburgh.
In 2001, in the largest and most diverse city in the state, not a single high school had an African-American head football coach. At the time, Floyd Keith, then the executive director of the Black Coaches & Administrators organization based in Indianapolis, used the same word to describe Louisville’s coaching demographics that Smith did for Pittsburgh’s — embarrassing.
Nine years later, the situation was drastically different, as 40 percent of the city’s public school programs were led by an African-American. What had been a stark landscape for minorities morphed into one permeated by hope and a sense of opportunity.
The forces behind such a radical shift were not a firm set of rules, but rather a mindset.
“Principals and athletic directors are going to get who they feel like is the best person, regardless of race,” said Jerry Wyman, head of athletics for Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky. “But at the same time, one of the things I preach to athletic directors every year is that we’re a diverse school system and our coaching staffs need to reflect our population of kids.”
While the Rooney Rule revolutionized NFL coaching searches and the NCAA purports to take an active role in promoting diversity, high school athletic associations aren’t dealing with multibillion-dollar enterprises or major universities. They either don’t want to or don’t have the power to put mandates in place that require schools to interview at least one minority candidate for a job opening.
The PIAA, for example, is a voluntary organization, so even if schools were open to requirements such as the Rooney Rule, many wonder about its feasibility.
“In regard to anything other than those rules, there’s no reference,” WPIAL executive director Tim O’Malley said of the state’s coaching requirements. “I’m sure they’re not going to go down that path.”
In an email, PIAA executive director Bob Lombardi added that coaching hires are the sole matter of the local school and that the PIAA “has no say in the matter since these are personnel issues.”
Given those facts, Pittsburgh schools will be faced with the same challenge Wyman was nearly a decade ago - if minority coaching numbers are going to improve, it will have to be done organically.
Among coaches, there’s some sense that could happen, even without the implementation of rules.
Six of the nine minority coaches in the area were hired within the past four years, an indication that schools with recent openings have been willing to turn to an African-American.
And the current crop of minority coaches has done its part in helping pave the way for others who hope to find their way in the profession.
Almost two months ago, Wade became the first African-American coach to win a WPIAL football championship since at least 1979, which is as far back as Post-Gazette records go. Clairton ultimately fell in the PIAA championship Dec. 12, its only loss of the season.
In six seasons at Jeannette, Roy Hall has a 47-17 record. This past season, Adams had moribund Southmoreland on the verge of ending a 35-year playoff drought. Washington took Moon to the playoffs in consecutive years after the Tigers went 8-47 from 2007-12. Despite that success, he was fired Dec. 3 after being told that the school wanted to “go in another direction.”
Most any time a topic such as minority misrepresentation comes up, however, so do questions surrounding its importance.
For scholars such as Lapchick who have devoted their lives to studying it, it’s a matter of perspective, of bringing as many people with as many different backgrounds as possible to the proverbial table.
To players, young men at a fragile juncture of their lives, it can be as simple as having someone in a position of authority to look up to.
“He knows everything we’re going through before we even go through it,” Clairton senior Ju’Juan Jackson said of Wade. “He knows what to tell us when it happens because he’s been through it or he knows people that have been through it.”
It’s a responsibility Wade cherishes, even if it presents challenges. He walked the same halls and streets that his players do today and the man who grew up a few blocks from Clairton’s Millvue Acres housing projects serves as an example of what’s possible, of what these young men surrounded by uncertainty can become.
Wade had to wait years to get to this moment, and as his career continues, he carries a torch, for the 30 players who line up for him and, perhaps unwittingly, for minority coaches like himself.
“I want to try to help these kids get out of the poverty, to try to get out of the environment so they can have success and then come back and get some more,” Wade said.
“To me, that’s what it’s all about.”
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Information from: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, https://www.post-gazette.com
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