By any measure, Tamika Duck, 25, is on the fast-track for a successful career in sports management. The former center and power forward on the women’s basketball team at Virginia Union University, from which she graduated in 2007, has just returned to her alma mater as first-in-command for sports information.
Duck had been working at a similar task at historically Black Virginia State University in Petersburg where she worked on a master’s in sports management before winning a job just up the road at VUU in Richmond. “It’s just a dream come true,” says Duck, who credits her sports-crazed father with advocating her career. “He just pushed on me,” she says.
Another man is behind her progress, too, Duck says. The late Arthur Robert Ashe Jr., Richmond, Va., born and raised, cleared away racial barriers in the 1950s and 1960s when he took up tennis at all- Black Brookfield park just a couple of miles from VUU in then strictly segregated Richmond. The famed tennis star braved racial insults in the Jim Crow city where he was allowed to play only Black kids in school matches and could not play on lighted city courts at night. To compete against White players, he had to drive north to Maryland.
Thanks to trailblazers such as Ashe, talented African-Americans such as Duck are having an easier time climbing the ladder of college sports management. In a sweet irony, it seems to be particularly true in Virginia, the so-called “mother of presidents,” where White leaders responded to court-ordered integration in the 1950s with their infamous “massive resistance” policy, blocking Whites and Blacks from going to school together.
“I think we have witnessed progress in the past decade or two, but there are challenges and we can turn those challenges into opportunities,” says Dr. Bernard Franklin, who is now the highest-ranking Black executive at the National College Athletic Association, the country’s foremost college sports organization. Franklin also happens to have strong ties to Virginia. His grandmother’s family is from Richmond, and he was president of VUU before joining the NCAA in 2002 to become an executive vice president.
Politics and Sports
Indeed, the list of Blacks with ties to the Old Dominion and its capital and who hold top sports management positions in the pros or at schools is impressive. For instance, Mike Tomlin, a former wide receiver for the College of William & Mary, is now head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Only the 10th Black coach in the NFL, he led the Steelers to Super Bowl victory this year, the second Black coach to take professional football’s highest prize.
