Black Coaches

For a brief stretch last month, Loyola basketball coach Skip Prosser was the toast of Baltimore, and deservedly so. Assuming the reigns of a Loyola College team that had suffered through a 2-25 nightmare the previous year, Mr. Prosser led the Greyhounds to a 17-13 record that included a conference tournament title and the school's first appearance in the Division I NCAA basketball tournament.Just over a week ago, Mr. Prosser was swift to reap the rewards for a job well done, accepting the head job at Xavier University, where he had previously served as an assistant coach for eight years.

Before Parkville's football team kicks off its first home game, the Knights will rename their field in honor of Joseph Anthony Yates Sr., Baltimore County's first African-American football coach. The dedication of Yates Field will take place Sept. 12 at 12:30 p.m. before Parkville's game against Lansdowne. Yates, who died in 2006 at the age of 83, coached the Knights from 1971 to 1981. Yates' legacy is not about coaching but character, said Ron Belinko, coordinator of athletics for Baltimore County, who coached football at Overlea at the time.

WASHINGTON -- The Black Coaches Association yesterday called off a proposed boycott this weekend of men's Division I basketball games after receiving an offer from the Justice Department to hear its concerns and try to mediate its differences with the NCAA.At an afternoon news conference on Capitol Hill, BCA executive director Rudy Washington and Congressional Black Caucus chairman Kweisi Mfume, D.-Md., accompanied by Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson, outlined those concerns, which deal mostly with the lack of opportunities given prospective college athletes from economically and educationally deprived backgrounds.

Since its most recent winning season 12 years ago, the Army football program has had four head coaches. It has gone from being an independent to a member of Conference USA and back to being an independent. This season, it switched offenses, going to a variation of the triple option used by Navy. Little, if anything, has worked. Though the team is certainly not the doormat it was from 2000 through 2003, when the Black Knights won a total of five games and finished the 2003 season winless, Army (3-8)

University of Maryland athletic director Andy Geiger has stressed to newly appointed football coach Mark Duffner the importance of hiring black assistants.Geiger says he emphasized the message to all of the candidates for the job, which was given to Duffner on Tuesday after a three-week search.The lack of blacks on the staff of former coach Joe Krivak was a key issue at the end of the season when Geiger evaluated Krivak and the program. Krivak had one black on his staff during each of his five years as coach.

Coppin State's Fang Mitchell and UMBC's Earl Hawkins said yesterday that they will join fellow members of the Black Coaches Association in a proposed boycott of next week's National Association of Basketball Coaches' Issues Forum in Charlotte, N.C."I think it's the first step in getting our message across," said Mitchell, who, along with Hawkins, was to be among an estimated 100 black Division I head coaches attending the first NABC forum, a three-day meeting scheduled to begin Monday.The message sent out this week by BCA executive director Rudy Washington and other members of his organization is clear: Recent and imminent NCAA legislation that cuts scholarship limitations, raises academic standards and sets a maximum salary for restrictive-earnings coaches at $16,000 a year reduces the opportunities black athletes have at getting a college education and prospective coaches have at pursuing their chosen careers.

WASHINGTON -- In an attempt to change NCAA rules that it believes reduce the opportunity for blacks to play and coach major college basketball, as well as legislate at the highest levels of intercollegiate athletics, the Black Coaches Association (BCA) has enlisted the help of Congress.After a 90-minute meeting yesterday with an estimated 50 men's and women's coaches, Rep. Kweisi Mfume, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said that a task force will be established to look at the problems that have grown out of recent cuts in scholarships and coaching jobs in Division I basketball.

The last five coaches hired in the National Basketball Association have been John Lucas in San Antonio, Fred Carter in Philadelphia, Sidney Lowe in Minnesota, Quinn Buckner in Dallas and Don Chaney in Detroit. They are all former NBA players. They are also all black.In joining Wes Unseld of the Washington Bullets and Len Wilkens of the Cleveland Cavaliers, they raised the number of black coaches to seven -- the most there have ever been. Nearly 26 percent of the league's head coaches are black, and the Atlanta Hawks have not named a replacement for Bob Weiss, who was fired last week.

It's not every day you hear Thurgood Marshall's name spoken in the same context with Marvin Lewis', but that's exactly what lawyer Johnnie Cochran did yesterday during a news conference at Don Shula's Steak House in Baltimore. Cochran and fellow attorney Cyrus Mehri are calling on the NFL to reform its hiring practices and say they have devised a plan that will help make sure African-American coaches get a fair opportunity to compete for head-coaching positions. Though 67 percent of the players in the NFL are African-American, only two of its 32 head coaches are. "Baltimore has always been a cradle for civil rights issues," Cochran said.

FOR WEEKS, football friends barged into my office with Molotov cocktails in their eyes or left incendiary messages on voice mail. My buddy Herb threw up his hands so violently as we watched a game that I could not tell if he was gesticulating for emphasis or signaling for a Heimlich to cough up his barbecue ribs. Assuming that I was in an apocalyptic misery, my friends said: "That was cold what they did to your boy." "Your boys sure didn't give the brother any time, did they?" "We have to do something about that Packers management."

The hiring practices in college football got yet another lousy grade from the Black Coaches and Administrators (formerly known as the Black Coaches Association) in the group's latest report card, released this month. The bad marks on the fourth annual report were accompanied by the strongest implication yet, from executive director Floyd Keith, that the only way to resolve this sorry situation is in court. Yet last week at ESPN Zone at the Inner Harbor, there was evidence that fairness in hiring might be achieved without lawsuits.

This is not the type of shutout that Rex Ryan is used to. Or ever should get used to. One NFL head coaching opening remains, now that Bill Parcells has quit on another team - er, ah, retired after a trying season with the Dallas Cowboys. When the first five jobs opened up this offseason, Ryan - the Ravens' defensive coordinator, but you knew that already - got no interviews. If the early indications about the last one are true, he won't get an interview for the sixth, either. Being the coordinator of the top-ranked defense in the NFL, the one that anchored the team tied for the second-best record in the league, apparently doesn't get you as far as it used to. The snubs do bring two pieces of good news.

Tony Dungy of the AFC's Indianapolis Colts and Lovie Smith of the NFC's Chicago Bears will be on opposing sidelines in the Super Bowl, but for reasons that transcend those roles and even their warm personal relationship, they will be entwined forever in NFL history. As the first African-American head coaches to reach the Super Bowl, they will be remembered for attaining a place in their mutual journey that many regard as much a challenging beginning as a triumphant conclusion. It was only in 1989 that the Los Angeles Raiders made Art Shell the first African-American coach in the league's modern era. "I think it's an important hurdle to get over, but not one that changes any essential dynamic," said pioneering sports sociologist Harry Edwards of the Super Bowl benchmark.

Joseph Anthony Yates Sr., who became the first black football coach in Baltimore County public school history when he was named head coach at Parkville Senior High School in 1971, died Saturday of a brain tumor at Good Samaritan Hospital. The longtime Forest Park resident was 83. Mr. Yates was born in Eufaula, Okla., and raised in Mesa, Ariz., where he graduated from high school in 1940. In 1942, he joined the Army and served with a combat trucking unit in Europe that carried ammunition for the 3rd and 6th tank divisions of Gen. George S. Patton Jr.'s 3rd Army.

This is how far the NFL has come in six years. In January 2000, coaches were bequeathing their jobs to their friends, and teams were gratefully handing out compensation for the right to hire candidates with spotty won-lost records. It all seemed like a sure sign that the path to those jobs for black coaches was permanently blocked, no matter what was being tried to unblock it. Now it's January 2006 - and coaches are bequeathing jobs to their friends, and teams are compensating their colleagues in order to hire them.

THE BLACK COACHES Association, in a statement Tuesday afternoon about the latest travesty of sports and social justice, said the firing of Tyrone Willingham by Notre Dame "sends an alarming message to African-Americans dreaming of pursuing a career in coaching football on the collegiate level." If the BCA is true to its statement and to its ideals, it needs to send an "an alarming message" of its own, to those who turned the clock on hiring back to the Jim Crow era, to the Notre Dames of the world and to the people and institutions who make them possible.

The Black Coaches Association met the other day with the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss ways of changing some of the regulations and practices of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The coaches feel that blacks have been excluded from leadership roles in the NCAA, and that decisions regarding such things as the size of staffs and the number of scholarships have been harmful to black youths.Many of the items on the black coaches' bill of particulars are right on target, but one is not. That is their opposition to raising admissions standards for athletes.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- He was not one of those coaching wunderkinds, like Rick Pitino. Nor was he deemed a can't-miss protege by one of the game's masters, as Mike Krzyzewski was.The road Arkansas coach Nolan Richardson traveled to last night's 76-72 win over Duke for the NCAA championship has had more twists and turns than any in the Ozark Mountains."

The monster that is Notre Dame football has swallowed another of its coaches, but this time the move has ramifications that go well beyond the boundaries of South Bend, Ind. Tyrone Willingham, who was brought in from Stanford three years ago to return the Fighting Irish to national prominence after first choice George O'Leary was found to have falsified his resume, was fired yesterday. There are some who wonder whether college football is moving backward because the firing of Willingham cuts the number of African-American head coaches in Division I-A football to two. Willingham was the third black head coach to be fired or forced to resign in the past eight days, following Fitz Hill at San Jose State and Tony Samuel at New Mexico State.