Minorities still scarce among NCAA college football coaches

With close to 21 years of coaching experience at both the collegiate and professional ranks, BYU defensive coordinator Jaime Hill is in a good position to be considered for a head coaching job.
Hill, entering his fourth season with the Cougars, has his eyes set on someday leading a program in the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly known as Division I-A). But given the paltry number of black head coaches at the FBS level, Hill could be in for a much longer wait.
Entering the 2009 season, only seven of the 120 FBS football programs, or about 5.8 percent, have black head coaches, with only two other programs having minority head coaches. Four of the black coaches -- Miami of Ohio's Mike Haywood, New Mexico State's DeWayne Walker, New Mexico's Mike Locksley and Eastern Michigan's Ron English -- are in their first year as head coaches.
By comparison, six of 32 NFL franchises, or about 18.8 percent, have black head coaches. Excluding historically black colleges and universities, only 3.9 percent of the 582 football programs in Divisions I, II and III have coaches of color, according to the NCAA.
Considering that about 50 percent of FBS players are minorities, the low number of black head coaches remains a growing concern for black assistant coaches hoping to move up through the ranks.
"I think there's definitely a challenge; there's something that needs to be done," said Hill, who is the only black coach on BYU's staff. "When you talk about (50) percent of the athletes that are playing for those programs are of color, and you're saying that (coaches of that) color can't lead those individuals, that makes no sense to me."
The NCAA has created a few programs aimed at helping minority coaches network and gain more exposure. In 2005, NCAA President Myles Brand established the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, which is responsible for developing strategies, policies and programs that foster diversity in intercollegiate athletics.
This year, Diversity and Inclusion added the NCAA Champions Forum, which pairs 11 minority football assistant coaches and head coaches at sub-FBS levels with athletic directors who can mentor them in the hiring process, teach them about the non-football related responsibilities of being a head coach and help them gain exposure. Hill was one of the 11 coaches selected for the Champions Forum, which was held last week in Orlando, Fla.
"As to what degree it'll help you, no one knows that," Hill said. "But it opens your eyes to the things that you weren't able to see prior to going. (It's an) opportunity to visit ADs that I probably would never have had the opportunity to meet, get a feel for them and what they're looking for and basically do mock interviews.
"It's a job shadowing kind of deal, where we'll be assigned to an athletic director and kind of get a feel of what they do on a day-do-day basis, and they can get a feel of you, as well."
Evidence suggests that the Diversity and Inclusion's programs are paying some dividends. Since the creation of the NCAA Expert Coaches Academy, which feeds applicants into the Champions Forum, six of its participants have been hired as FBS head coaches. Two black offensive coordinators, Maryland's James Franklin and Kentucky's Joker Phillips, are coaches-in-waiting and will probably succeed their bosses in 2011.
However, Charlotte Westerhaus, NCAA vice president for Diversity and Inclusion, said that there is still more work to be done.
"The coaching academies emphasize that there are more qualified men of color who are capable of being head coaches than there actually are head coaches," Westerhaus said. "That disparity is becoming more and more apparent. (The issue) is becoming more stark.
"Why aren't there more head coaches of color in the NCAA? We're not where we should be. We're not even close."
Some coaches aren't attributing this disparity to racism. Rather, they think the problem is in trying to network with the athletic directors are responsible for hiring the head coaches.
"I don't think it has anything to do with the color of your skin," said Henry Frazier III, head coach at Prairie View A&M in Texas, a Football Championship Subdivision program, and a participant in the Champions Forum. "I firmly believe that it has everything to do with relationships. You're talking about being the CEO of a multi-million dollar organization, and you're looking at presidents and athletic directors. If they don't have relationships with minority candidates, then it's going to be hard for them to hire them.
"I don't think they just actually go out here and say, 'I'm going to hire a white guy.' They're going to hire somebody that they have a relationship with to manage that organization."
There are more black athletic directors at the FBS level, 12, than black head football coaches. Three of the athletic directors -- New Mexico's McKinley Boston, Buffalo's Warde Manuel and Eastern Michigan's Derrick Gragg -- employ black football coaches. Manuel and Gragg also employ black men's basketball coaches, making Buffalo and Eastern Michigan the only FBS schools to have blacks at the three most prominent positions.
Still, administrators said that hirings boil down to building relationships with athletic directors at FBS programs, not skin color. A lot of minority coaches don't have these opportunities.
"Part of the Champions program will remove some of those barriers," said Albany athletic director Lee McElroy, a participant in the Champions Forum. "We're going to prepare these young people to build a network and to understand that becoming a head coach is like being a CEO of an organization. I think it's going to be wonderful program."
Hill believes that the low number of black football head coaches isn't necessarily an issue of racism, but he realizes that the situation isn't too promising at the moment. Still, he hasn't given up hope of landing an FBS head coaching job.
"The landscape will change at some point," Hill said. "I don't know if it'll be during my lifetime, but if I don't do the things that I'm currently doing, how will the next person have an opportunity to do what they want to do? Part of the process is for me to go through this process to see if I can help us as a people, in a sense, to move forward."

E-mail Ronnie Turner at rturner(at)sltrib.com

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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