As the best of men’s college basketball converge in Detroit this weekend for the Final Four and the women’s game faces its National Championship test in St. Louis, it’s appropriate to take a moment and remember that these incredible players are students. Their prolific skills on the hardwood get them television airtime, but their efforts in the classroom are likely to shape the rest of their lives.
That’s why Dr. Richard Lapchick produces his own scorecard, of sorts, on which of these top schools for athleticism graduate their basketball and football players, paying particular attention to schools that leave their Black student-athletes sitting on the graduation sideline.
“I think of myself as an activist first,” says Lapchick, who has spent virtually his entire professional career tackling diversity issues, focusing on what he sees as the power of sport to propel social change. He is the director of The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida, which publishes studies examining the graduation rates and academic progress rates (APR) for teams involved in Division I basketball and football.
Lapchick, 63, grew up enmeshed in the realities of college and professional sports. His late father, Joe Lapchick, played center for the Boston Celtics and then went on to a successful coaching career, first at St. John’s College, then with the New York Knicks and then back to St. John’s, where Richard Lapchick would eventually earn his bachelor’s. He recalls, as a 5-year-old boy, looking out the window of the family’s Yonkers, N.Y., home to see his father’s image swinging from a tree across the street with people under the tree picketing. He recalls picking up the telephone and hearing people shout, “Nigger lover.”
Years later, Lapchick learned these grotesque actions were prompted by the Knicks signing one of the first three Black players in the history of the NBA.
When Lapchick was 11, he found his father, upon his return from St. John’s one day, crying.
“When he composed himself, he told me that what he was upset about was he had found out that day that his players weren’t going to class,” he recalls. But they were still playing on the college team. “He realized that he was an employee and a representative of an institution of higher education, and he had never asked his players about classes they were taking, what they were majoring in, what they were going to do when they graduated or if they were going to graduate.
