Coaching while Black: New chances and new voices

Richardson offers new chances for athletic success

Junior college football often doesn’t get the same media attention, especially in these parts. Its walk-up music easily could be the Beatles’ classic “Nowhere Man.”

Jeremy Richardson was hired at Rochester Community and Technical College this past spring as head football coach. He might be the only Black junior college coach in Minnesota, but he is the school’s first Black head coach since Terrance Issac Sr. was there from 2022 to 2025.

“It’s very important, it’s crucial,” Richardson said about being a Black head football coach. He was head coach at Joliet (IL) Junior College, where he won two Graphic Edge Bowl championships (2007, 2009), and led programs at Northland Community and Technical College in Minnesota in 2019 and Erie Community College in New York. “When I got into coaching, I never thought I’d be a head coach. I always just wanted to be a coordinator and just coach.

“But when I got a taste of being a head coach, I loved it, liked it, and it gave me a different mindset and a feeling,” he pointed out.

His overall goal when he’s recruiting is to convince players that junior college football isn’t a last resort but another opportunity for success.

“Regardless if you come play for me or not,” Richardson continued, “I’m going to give you the best advice. You’re getting a chance to achieve a goal that a lot of these young athletes set forth for themselves when they were 7, 8, 9, 10 years old playing Little League ball, middle school ball and then into high school ball.

“Then all of a sudden that goal is no longer achievable or no longer wanted because you didn’t get recruited by Coach P.J. Fleck at the University of Minnesota, or you didn’t get recruited by the great coaching staff at North Dakota State, or you didn’t get recruited by other Big Ten schools. I try to let young student-athletes know your goal is still there.

“You still have a chance … come to a junior college, perform at a high level and show those coaches that they might have missed the boat on you when you were coming out of high school,” Richardson stressed. “From Coach Richardson, you’re going to learn how to be a better student. You’re going to learn how to grow up and how to understand things in life, and things like that.”

Richardson hopes to reestablish the football success that former coach Issac Sr. built during his time at Rochester, or continue the success he established at his other stops in his coaching journey.

“Being a Black coach, whether it’s at junior college or any college level, we have to wear it as a badge of honor because we know not a lot of us get these opportunities,” Richardson reiterated. “I’m blessed and fortunate that this is my fifth opportunity to be a head coach at this level, so I’m very blessed in that. It’s my calling to show others that you can do this as well. I am also showing that we can be more than just a recruiter, more than just a position coach, more than just somebody who is what they call a player development rep.”

Whiting: councilman, young people’s mentor

By day, Jamison Whiting is in his first term on the Minneapolis City Council. But each afternoon during football season, the Southside native dashes off to his high school alma mater, Minneapolis Washburn, where he is a volunteer assistant varsity football coach.

“People were asking me during the campaign and during the election,” recalled Whiting, who was elected in 2025 to represent Ward 11, the southernmost part of Minneapolis, “‘Are you still gonna coach?’ I was like, ‘I will drop this job before I stop coaching.’”

Of course, Whiting is half joking, as he knows his primary duty is to his constituents, but he also sees working with young male and female athletes as equally important.

“I grew up here in the Twin Cities, right here in Minneapolis,” Whiting said. “I went to Washburn for high school, and oh goodness, had a village of coaches around me who made sure that I was on the right track and doing things correctly.”

After graduating from Northern Iowa, where he also played football, Whiting attended law school and later became a lawyer at a large local law firm. He once interned for Keith Ellison when Ellison was a U.S. congressman.

Whiting also worked as a police reform attorney in the Minneapolis City Attorney’s office.

But before his successful run for public office, Whiting worked on the Washburn sidelines:

“I coach all of the defensive backs and now I’m in my second full season of coaching our girls flag football team as well,” he said. “I think in life you get to do the things that you actually enjoy doing, and coaching is one of them.

“It is a place that I think gave me my start and laid the foundation for my success,” he continued. “I’ve been telling people that once I get to 3:30, from 3:30 to 5:30 Monday through Friday, it is a place that I can kind of just escape all of the craziness of the world and entirely focus on one common goal, and that’s really building up young men and women to be productive members of society, and that’s a piece that I fully enjoy doing.”

As a high schooler, Whiting watched Black coaches, including current Washburn AD Giovan Jenkins and others, up close to learn how to be an effective Black coach himself, and an effective role model to youngsters who also look like him.

“All the coaches that were there for me,” Whiting explained, “modeled what that looked like, modeled what success looked like, modeled how you should be holding yourself to a certain standard as a young Black man in the City of Minneapolis.

“I hope I can do the same for the young men and women coming behind me.”

Any dreams of higher political office, or being a head coach someday?

“I think being an assistant coach is the sweet spot,” Whiting concluded. “I get to do exactly what I want to do, of really coaching and leaning into our young people, without having to worry about all the logistics that come with being a head coach.

“I think, especially as it relates to my political career,” the first-term councilman reiterated, “I don’t think my wife would let me go any longer than I do now.”

Copyright © Charles Hallman

Charles Hallman welcomes reader responses at challman@spokesman-recorder.com.