Another View
Two Black head coaches led teams to this year’s Final Fours: South Carolina’s Dawn Staley and Kevin Keatts of North Carolina State. Staley last week was named AP Coach of the Year, and Houston’s Kelvin Sampson won NABC Division I Coach of the Year.
Norfolk State’s Robert Jones (men’s) and Tomekia Reed of Jackson State (women’s) respectively won HBCU National Coach of the Year honors, and Grambling Men’s Coach Donte Jackson was named Ben Jobe Coach of the Year as the country’s best NCAA D-I “minority” college basketball coach.
But these honorees shouldn’t ignore the fact that annually Black coaches are too often one-and-done as college head coaches. The annual college coaching carousel of firings and hirings that starts almost immediately after the season is completed often stops long enough for White coaches to get hired and rehired, but too often just goes round and round for Black coaches.
The latest USC Race and Equity Center report by Dr. Shaun Harper noted that although Black women were 21% of the 355 NCAA Division I head women’s basketball coaches in 2023, White male coaches outnumbered them by five percentage points.
This off-season, there are 42 schools with men’s college basketball head coaching openings and at least 15 WBB coaching openings.
At last check, 14 Black men’s coaches got fired and five hired; two Black women’s coaches were fired, one resigned, three were hired and one promoted from interim to HC. Only in a couple of instances where a Black coach was fired was another Black hired to replace them (Kenny Brooks for Kyra Elzy at Kentucky, and Mark Montgomery for Mike Davis at Detroit Mercy).
Advancement of Blacks in Sports (ABIS) released for the third straight year its men’s and women’s basketball watchlists of Black men and women in current head, associate, and assistant coaches jobs. As its press release stated, the ABIS Watchlists “serve as a crucial resource …amplifying the contributions of Black coaches as the hiring cycle unfolds.”
Reed is among the 12 Black WBB head coaches on the ABIS list, and there are 26 Blacks on the assistant/associate head coach list. There are 16 Black head coaches and 23 Black assistant/associate head coaches on the MBB watchlist.
Tangela Smith, however, is not on any of the lists. The former Iowa star and 13-year WNBA veteran joined the Northwestern women’s coaching staff in 2018. Her primary responsibilities include post-player development and overall team skill development. She previously coached at Western Michigan for four seasons.
“I think it’s good to see Black and brown faces in our positions,” said Smith, who is among the few Black associate HCs in the Big Ten. The associate head coach is usually the next in line after the head coach, and sometimes the coach-in-waiting.
The Chicago native played for C. Vivian Stringer at Iowa, where she was 1998 Big Ten Player of the Year and two-time all-conference, with two regular season titles and the 1997 Big Ten tournament title. Smith left Iowa with a degree in sports, health, leisure, and physical studies as well as the school’s all-time leader in blocks, third in rebounds, and seventh in scoring. She later got a master’s in sports management at Western Michigan.
A 12th overall pick by Sacramento in 1998, Smith played for five WNBA clubs, including two league champions. When she retired in 2012, Smith made the W’s top 10 in points, rebounds, blocks, FG attempts and made. She played on three overseas team championships as well.
She told us after a game earlier this season, “I took two years [off] after I retired. I didn’t have any aspirations” of coaching, Smith admitted. But she’s glad that Northwestern Coach Joe McKeown hired her: “I’m from Chicago. He wanted to bring me back home.”
It is “super important” that Blacks are in all coaching positions, especially Black females, and especially for Black youths to see, concluded Smith. “I don’t know if they have dreams and aspirations…but if there’s something that they want to do in the future, I feel like this is great because they see it right up front.”