The percentage of Black head coaches in Division I college basketball has declined the past 10 years. That startling development is among the findings in the 2017 version of the annual College Sport Racial and Gender Report Card, released Wednesday by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.
During the 2016-17 season, 22.3 percent of head coaches in men’s basketball were Black on the Division I level. That figure is up by 1.5 percentage points from the 20.8 in the 2015-16 season.
But there is more to the story. Despite the uptick, that 22.3 figure still is down by nearly 3 percentage points from the all-time high of 25.2 percent during the 2005-2006 season.
“Nobody was really paying attention to it (the decline) for years, probably because everyone assumed the numbers wouldn’t go down,” Dr. Richard Lapchick, chair of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program at TIDES at UCF, told Diverse. “At one time, a few years ago, it was just below or around 20 percent. Then, we noticed it more. The spotlight needs to be on it.”
Another finding is that the percentage of Black men’s Division I basketball players decreased in 2016-17 to 53 percent. That’s a 1.8 percent decline from the previous season. White players increased fractionally to 26.9 percent.
“There’s often fluctuations,” Lapchick said. “But it hasn’t happened two years in a row – not yet, anyway. So it’s not a trend.”
However, a different matter could be a trend. When it comes to admittance to college, Black male athletes appear to garner an advantage. For example, during the 2016-2017 season, Black male student-athletes comprised 22.2 percent, 20.4 percent and 12.2 percent of all male student-athletes in Divisions I, II and III, respectively. Latinos were 4.8 percent, 7 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively. Asian/Pacific Islanders were 1.9 percent, 1.3 percent and 2.1 percent, respectively. Native-Americans were .3 percent, .6 percent and .3 percent, respectively.
