There is good news and discouraging news in the “2010 College Sport Racial and Gender Report Card” issued on Thursday by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida. The combined grade for racial and gender hiring practices is a B, which the study’s principal author Dr. Richard Lapchick describes as “average.”
“College sport has to recognize that all of the major pro sports now have gotten either an A or an A- for racial hiring practices. Even though the B is an improvement (the last grade for racial hiring practices was C+), among the people who organize high level sports in America, college sport is in last place with that B,” says Lapchick.
The good news first: the number of African-American head football coaches in Football Bowl Subdivisions institutions has increased significantly over the past few years. Eighteen head coaches of color will start the 2011 season, which is more than double the number four years ago.
Then there is the other side: 100 percent of the conference commissioners at the 11 FBS conferences are White males. Throughout Division I athletics, excluding HBCU schools, 100 percent of conference commissioners were White, which includes five women.
The majority of athletic director positions at colleges and universities are held by White people, with little or no change since the report card in 2008. Women athletic directors gained a bit of ground in Divisions I and III, with 8.3 percent of athletic directors in Division I and 27.4 percent in Division III. There is little racial diversity among the women in Division I.
“We’ve got to get more women in those higher level jobs,” says Lapchick. “The only way that’s going to happen is publicizing this type of data as well as pressing both within the schools and their alumni and the public in general.
“You can just look at the numbers of African-American women who have any kind of influential positions in college sports and basically they don’t exist,” he adds. “The more people that know how bad it is, the more possibility there is to have a breakthrough.”
