In the latest Racial and Gender Report Card from The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) the overall grade for college sport is a C+.
While that C+ does note a small gain between 2017 and 2018, leadership positions in intercollegiate athletics still fail to reflect the diversity of the student-athletes on the fields of play. With a B-, racial hiring has a slight uptick, but gender hiring remains the same at a C+.
At 22.4 percent, the percentage of African-American Division I men’s head basketball coaches remains down from the all-time high of 25.2 percent reported in 2005–06. During the most recent reporting period African-American student-athletes comprised 53.6 percent of the players in Division I Men’s Basketball.
Across sports, there are men coaching women’s sports, but there are currently no women coaching men’s basketball at any level. In Division I Women’s Basketball, 43 percent of the student-athletes were African-American, but only 11.9 percent of the head coaches were African-American women.
“Forty-seven years after the passage of Title IX, nearly 60 percent of women’s teams are still coached by men,” said Dr. Richard Lapchick, director of TIDES and the primary author of The 2018 Racial and Gender Report Card: College Sport (CSRGRC). “That doesn’t make any sense and it’s obviously wrong.”
“The Whiteness of the coaching ranks when you look at Divisions I, II and III shows me how far we have to go,” he added.
For more than a decade, Lapchick has advocated for an Eddie Robinson/Judy Sweet rule akin to pro football’s Rooney rule, but said the NCAA says it is unable to do that.
