Jared Kirkey Writing Studies See my Public Service Announcement on this issue at: https://www.wevideo.

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Black Inequality in Black-Dominated Sports

African Americans have been extremely prevalent in major sports, particularly in football and basketball. African Americans comprise 76.3% of all NBA players. Similarly in the NFL, African Americans comprise 66.3% of all NFL players (Lapchick, NFL/NBA ). These are staggering numbers. In both sports African Americans clearly dominate. Based on these percentages you would expect blacks to have earned their stripes and respect as it pertains to equality in player positions, coaching positions, and management positions too. Unfortunately inequality still exists in these areas of sports.

African Americans are lacking in management positions more so in the NFL than in the NBA, but still an issue in the NBA nonetheless. This has been going on for numerous decades. The Rooney Rule has helped with this issue. The Rooney Rule was set up in 2003; it requires NFL teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operating jobs. The Rooney Rule has done a good job in ensuring that African Americans and other minority groups receive the same opportunity as the other major ethnic groups, but it has not yet fixed the problem 100%. Many people claim the reason for the lack of African American representation in management positions is because of the lack of management experience or the lack of time theyve been involved in the business end of sports.

Team ownership aside, the lower tier positions all have competent African Americans who can perform at a high level but simply do not get the chance. Lower tier positions include team presidents, general managers, team personnel directors, coaches etc. The team presidents and general managers perform similar roles in an organization. In fact, teams may choose to have only a general manager and not a team president, or a team president and not a general manager. Their roles include; controlling player transactions and negotiations, hiring and firing of the coaching staff, and a general overseer of the franchise. Team personnel directors are responsible for knowing any and every relevant player in that particular sport who can possibly become available and help their team. This is a very complex job because a lot of the job is timing and anticipation of available athletes and players. Coaching is pretty straightforward. The head coach is responsible for training and developing the athletes on his/her team. Head coaches are typically paid a lot of money for their work, because essentially it is their team. They control every aspect of practice, traveling, and other functions that go on within the team. White people fill majority of these positions, and blacks continue to struggle.

By simple process of elimination, race, in one of the most sophisticated ways possible, becomes the answer. This is not to say that the individuals of power are racist. However, this is an industry where relationships are key to being hired, and in my cases sports people, like other people in society, do not necessarily have long-term relationships with African Americans (Shropshire, 1999). This is very unfortunate. Managerial skills and talents an African American might possess will unlikely be able to flourish because in many scenarios it is all about whom you know rather than what you

can bring to the table.

Many people prompt the question, why dont the players themselves stand up and address this issue? There are a couple reasons why. First off, many athletes do speak about this issue but in private. This is because some fear their comments could jeopardize their jobs. Players understand they are never completely secure and safe when it comes to their job, they can be dropped and picked up extremely fast which is all apart of the harsh business which is sports. Also, players are typically concerned with their own monetary benefits from the sport they are participating in because they cant play forever, and need to soak up as much as they can before their time runs out. It is also tough for players to speak out individually because there is only so much one or two athletes can do. In order for the players to make a difference on this issue, there would need to be an abundance of players willing stand up against the very people who cut their pay check which in reality is very tough to do during this day and age in sports.

For all management and higher-level sport positions, a qualified person is required for the job. This should be the same for the people who are hiring others for these positions. Are the people in power qualified to make management hirings? Are they unbiased with an open-mind during the interview processes? Are they interviewing from a pool of diverse applicants? These are legitimate questions that can be asked based on what weve witnessed over the past decades. This level of inequality does not stop at only at the management positions; it continues to trickle down into coaching positions in sports as well.

These similar issues remain issues for African American coaches on the Professional or Collegiate level as well. In a league that is three-fourths black, 43% of NBA head coaches are African American. This number seems reasonable, but it has not made any progress in many years. White coaches filled just about all of the recent open coaching positions in the NBA this past season. This is very strange, considering the amount of African American coaches there are, and the success African American coaches have had in the sport of Basketball (Lapchick, NBA). Like Basketball, Football is experiencing similar issues.

These issues, however, seem to be more egregious in the sport of Football than in Basketball. At the end of the 2012 NFL season, there were only four coaches of color. In the off-season leading up to the 2013 season, there were eight coaching vacancies for eight different teams. Not one black coach was hired by any of those eight teams. This is very unfortunate, because you had other coachs fresh off being fired from other teams taking these available coaching positions. Wins and losses determine how successful a coach is. When a coach consistently puts up more losses than wins, he is not doing a very good job as coach. Many of the available coaching vacancies that were open were filled with coaches who had just been fired because of consecutive losing seasons as opposed to giving someone else an opportunity to prove themselves and show what they got. When you look at the landscape of the NFL, you will find clear black dominance of the sport. 66.3% of players in the NFL are black, and 29.3% of the players are white (Lapchick, NFL). There is a clear, blatant discrepancy in the number of black coaches to

black players in the NFL. Its not like there are not any African American applicants, African Americans are just not getting hired. Its hard to fathom how a white coach could perform so poorly with another team over and over again, but yet get chosen ahead of a deserving black coach whos itching at the opportunity to coach.

History shows that black coaches have had tremendous success when given the opportunity. In just recent years black coaches have proven to be not only successful coaches, but also elite coaches because of their number of wins and how they lead their players in the locker room. Mike Tomlin is an African American coach for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He led the Steelers to the 2011 Super Bowl, which was his second during his tenure. In 2010 Jim Caldwell who is another African American head coach, led the Indianapolis Colts to the Super Bowl in his first season as a head coach. In 2007, the Indianapolis Colts faced the Chicago Bears in the Super Bowl. Both teams were run by black coaches; Tony Dungy of the Colts, and Lovie Smith of the Bears (Lapchick, NFL).

At the start of the 2013 NFL season, there were only three African American coaches. The Commissioner as well as other diversity groups appointed by the NFL has realized this problem, but not much has changed. Former players of the NFL formed the Fritz Pollard Alliance to add more pressure and bring about faster change to this issue. The Fritz Pollard Alliance promotes diversity and equal job opportunities in the coaching, front office, and scouting staffs of the NFL. It has done a good job thus far, but there is a long way to go ("fritzpollard.org"). Like the NFL, College Football is experiencing these same problems.

NCAA Football, like the NFL, has been having issues with African American coaches. For the amount of college programs there are, there should be more African American coaches running them. It has been like this for college football for decades. Of the 124 D-1A college football programs, only 15 universities had African American coaches during the 2012 season. At division 2 and 3, only 9 of the 113 universities had African American coaches. Part of this issue is the universities quick decisions to dismiss coaches of all backgrounds when immediate improvement does not take place. Another part of the problem are the white coaches with bad numbers, record wise, being looked at as hot commodities, while historically black coaches are given one shot to prove their talents (Lynch, 2013). Blacks historically have been given shorter leashes, and lesser room for error compared to whites. Coaching on the collegiate level is no different.

Inequality for blacks clearly exists in a field where blacks dominate. The numerous facts back this up. This has been a problem for many years, and will continue to be a problem until change happens. From management positions, to coaching positions, the sports industry is unequal for blacks. As time goes on more and more people will see the issue and want to provoke change. Lets just hope change is in the near future.

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