Coaches and officiating crew pose at the Black Coaches Classic, held at Mass-Boston earlier this season. Mass-Boston athletics photo

By Ryan Scott
D3hoops.com

Like nothing else in the past 50 years, the very public murder of George Floyd opened the eyes of white people to the racial disparities that exist in the United States. Conversation has been hot and heavy across the societal spectrum – from economics to policing to how the political structure itself is constructed – and we have collectively been challenged to do something, even if we’re unsure of precisely what to do.

The jury is still out on how well we translate that awareness and rhetoric into action.

The intersection of race and basketball must be kept in perspective when other issues very literally have life and death consequences, but just because something is less important does not make it unimportant – and basketball is most definitely our business at D3hoops.com.

As a 40 year old white man, I know venturing into the subject of race and coaching puts me in a number of places I have not been, but I also know that a failure to have these discussions contributes to the problem – and the numbers don’t lie; there is a problem.

According to the NCAA Demographics Database, over the last decade, the number of Division III basketball head coaches who are Black has remained quite static at around 10%. The number fluctuates from year to year, but not in any discernible pattern. As a comparison, 17% of current female Division III basketball players are Black; the number is 32% for men. These are both consistent.

The number of black assistant coaches has been steadily increasing, from 16% to 19% for women’s basketball and from 19% to 27% for men, over ten years. But the move from the second seat on the bench to the first has been a difficult transition for this growing population.

“Too many of us are being seen as recruiters only,” says Jason Harris, head men’s coach at Mass-Boston and founder of the Black Coaches Classic. “We’re being pigeon-holed into a very specific position and not seen as coaches in the same way.”

Some part of this coaching disparity must be attributed to decades of racist disparagement of black athletes as physical specimens of lesser intellectual ability. Even if those ideas are relics of the past, the effects of defining leadership as a white, male domain continues.

A quick google search reveals scores of academic papers and research at the NBA and Division I level demonstrating racial disparities on what kinds of jobs coaches get, how much they’re paid, the average tenure in a head coaching position, and what kind of opportunities are available after leaving a job.

“I worry when I see coaches of color take a bad job to get a shot,” said Harris, “because I wonder if it’ll be the only shot they get. I hate to paint a whole industry of people I’ve never met as racially biased, but there are still some schools who’ve never had a black coach in any sport ever.”

For Black female coaches, there’s a double struggle – against the encroaching presence of men in their profession (and a lack of equal opportunity to coach men), along with the racial disparities. I had to admit, in researching this story, that I did not have a preexisting relationship with any of the 28 Black women currently leading Division III basketball programs.

This left me to essentially cold call Kam Gissendanner of La Roche, who was gracious enough to speak for her profession, race, and gender – in addition to speaking for herself – which isn’t a reasonable thing to ask her to do, but illustrative of the problem.

Kam Gissendanner is one of just 28 Black women coaching Division III women's basketball teams, and unlike her male counterparts, who can generally get hired as women's basketball head coaches, there is little opportunity as of yet for a woman to get hired as a head coach in Division III men's basketball. La Roche athletics file photo

She said, “As a Black woman, I’m aware of how some people see me, that there may be hidden expectations, but nobody is going to put more pressure on me than me – and that has nothing to do with the color of my skin, it has to do with what I want for myself.”

This sentiment is echoed over and over again, across the sport. Basketball coaches are competitive people. They don’t want to be handed anything they didn’t earn. Time and again, the coaches I spoke with said, “I just want to put my head down and get to work.” Regardless of race, Black coaches just want the chance to prove themselves – and it’s been that chance, the opportunity, that’s been especially difficult for those coaches to achieve.

It’s the opportunity Jeff Brown continues to cherish, now in his 25th year at Middlebury.

“I really believe Tom Lawson, the outgoing AD and Russ Reilly, the former coach who went on to be the athletic director who hired me, were really intentional about my candidacy, bringing something different to our campus community than other qualified applicants. I’m really fortunate they had the foresight to be intentional and make decisions more off of background and personality and potential than just hiring someone with more experience.”

Brown points to Larry Anderson, now in his 27th year leading MIT basketball, as a coach who took a program with no real history of athletic success and turned it into a perennial contender. It’s a humble statement, because everything that’s true of Anderson is also true of Brown – both coaches have taken their teams to the Final Four and established a culture of success not previously seen at either institution. Both are Black coaches who made the most of what was an even more rare opportunity at the time.

For most of Brown’s tenure at Middlebury, he’s been the only Black coach in the NESCAC. That all changed with the recent hiring of Marlon Sears at Amherst, Brandon Linton at Tufts, and Alex Lloyd at Bowdoin.

This change, as Brown says, is probably not a coincidence. “Diversity has been highlighted in all of the NESCAC. Every school has a student athlete of color organization and they’ve set up these groups to increase the comfort level of students of color on predominantly white campuses. Athletic departments are partnered together on an allyship program where every athletic staff member went to a program examining identity and privilege. This makes a difference.”

Harris notes his new athletic director, Jacqueline Schuman, worked on these initiatives while at Colby, and continues to be an advocate in her new role. “You have to differentiate between being able to make these changes and being willing to make these changes and some schools are farther along than others. Jacqui is working to make necessary changes here at UMass-Boston and she’ll be pushing for similar things in the Little East Conference and we can’t stop there.”

Some schools may choose to hire a Black or Asian or Hispanic coach specifically because they value experience and perspective that candidate brings to the institution and the athletic department, but as Gissendanner reminded me, it’s not just hiring, it’s opportunity: “We need to make sure the candidate pools are diverse everywhere.”

This should be a point of emphasis at the Division III level, where, unlike other levels of NCAA basketball, the majority of players are still white. There may be campuses without a history of diverse faculty or student body who are hesitant to hire someone who doesn’t look like everyone else. Harris notes, “What a tremendous opportunity to have mostly white student athletes see a position of power being filled by a person of color.”

Continues Harris, “We have great students with great potential to be great head coaches on our benches and on our campuses right now, but we have to be intentional about reaching them and supporting them and showing them this is a viable career path for them.”

Exposure, more than anything else, is why Harris began the Black Coaches Classic, which premiered this year, featuring four of the seven Division III men’s basketball teams in Massachusetts led by Black coaches.

“We’re already lining teams up for next year. I want this to be a big event,” says Harris. “I think it has the potential to be a national event. I didn’t trademark the name. I want everyone to be able to use it. I want to see these events in Boston and Chattanooga and Houston, wherever – and we need it for women, too.”

“Game-in and game-out I look across from me and there’s nobody who looks like me,” says Gissendanner. “If you’re a great coach, of course, race doesn’t matter and we’re all human beings, so we can all connect on that level, but some of our athletes can’t be reached by people who don’t look like them, who don’t know what they’ve experienced, and we’re doing them a disservice if we don’t provide that.”

We don’t have the NCAA demographic data from the current season yet. Every coach I spoke with expressed great hope for better opportunities based on the hirings of this past offseason. Both the NBA and Division I set records for Black head coaching hires and we’re all expecting that trend to bear out in Division III as well.

But this is a movement, not a moment; it depends on our continued efforts and intentionality. Says Harris: “You can’t just talk about race when tragedy happens. That’s too late!”

We hear the inclusion mantra over and over in the NCAA commercials, “If you can play, you can play in Division III,” but it takes work to turn those words into reality and it will take all of us to make it happen.