re: Should race be a factor in coaching searches?

quote:

---

Yes and No. A football program is a product. The consumers are primarily fans of the program, and fans of the sport as an entertainment product. However, a successful football program also has to sell itself to quality high school football players. The pool of quality African-American football players is disproportionally high, while the numbers of African-American coaches (particularly head coaches), while growing, remain proportionally much lower than African-American participation in the sport. I make this point for this reason: If I have two candidates and one is superior, race drops to meaninglessness. If I had two candidates that were virtually identical in background, experience, personality, etc., yet one fits the demographics of a target customer group (i.e., I'm hiring a person to sell motorized scooters to the elderly and disabled. The older candidate might have the edge here, if all other factors are equal.). So, two equal candidates (and especially in the south), the African-American might have an edge in recruiting and with the cultural identification with the players and their families. (I think this is probably overblown, because the football sub-culture trumps, or certainly mitigates differences in racial and ethnic cultures, but it could still be a discriminator in helping choose the better candidate for the job.)


I, personally, make all judgments about people, based on the person, not their race. However, to completely ignore all aspects of race is terribly naive.

---