The second of two parts
When John Ashaolu told friends and family that he had been hired as the athletic director at Seton-LaSalle High School, the news was often met with surprise.
Though he would ask why they were astonished, he already knew the answer, one that had nothing to do with his qualifications or his soon-to-be employer. It was because Ashaolu, an African-American, was hired for a prominent position at a largely White Catholic school.
Soon enough, he realized that shock he received could be applied to most any other place in the area. When he would attend sporting events or go to conferences with colleagues from different schools, he was almost always confronted with a painful truth – that in his line of work, there were very few people who looked like him.
“It was so blatantly apparent,” said Ashaolu, who no longer works at the school. “When I would go to athletic director meetings, it’s just human nature to see who your peers are and you’re like, ‘Wow, OK.’ ”
Ashaolu’s experiences weren’t an anomaly; if anything, they were emblematic of a trend that factors into the scarcity of minority coaches in local high school football. Not only are the coaches in Western Pennsylvania overwhelmingly White – in the 2014 season, 9 of 130 local high schools had a minority head football coach (6.9 percent), a figure much lower than it is in similar cities in this region – but so also are athletic directors and principals, two of the figures most involved in coaching searches.
Only 3.9 percent of WPIAL and City League athletic directors are racial minorities, a figure that is identical for principals, according to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette survey. One school – West Shamokin – did not respond to multiple calls inquiring about the race of its principal.
From these figures comes a pressing question – if there are only a handful of minorities with titles of authority at high schools, should it really be a surprise that it’s the same way for football coaches?
“With those low numbers in those key positions, it’s very likely to influence how few African-American coaches or people of color there are in head coaching jobs,” said Dr. Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.
In the eyes of some, that reality extends beyond a handful of employees to the school districts themselves.
Numerous people interviewed for this story expressed skepticism over how receptive schools in predominantly white areas are to hiring a minority coach. Whether or not such prejudice exists, a pessimistic mindset subsists for many minority coaches when pursuing certain jobs, something that can prevent them from applying altogether.
Even for decorated individuals with established reputations such as former Gateway coach Terry Smith – who led the Gators to four WPIAL championship appearances from 2004-09 – that feeling existed.
In a racial discrimination lawsuit he filed against Gateway School District, Smith contended he was “subjected to retaliation and further discrimination, all intended to harass and get him to resign,” according to court documents. Some of those alleged actions included school board members avoiding contact with him, the implementation of stringent hiring practices for volunteer coaches (who had been predominantly black) and, ultimately, making his athletic director position a part-time one, a rare move for what was then a Class AAAA school.
The school district denied those first two claims and noted that the change in Smith’s employment status was a cost-cutting measure that had nothing to do with his race. The two sides reached a settlement last year.
Smith left Gateway in 2013 to become the wide receivers coach at Temple, an embattled exit at least partially prompted by the board’s decision. A little more than a year later, Gateway was able to pry Tom Nola from Clairton, allowing Wayne Wade – an accomplished African-American defensive coordinator who played an integral role in the Bears’ historic 66-game winning streak – to get a long-awaited head coaching opportunity.
Of course, there are examples that counteract this belief that some coaches hold. Mark Adams at Southmoreland, Mark Washington at Moon and Stacy Robinson at Union are African-Americans who lead football teams at schools with mostly homogeneous student bodies.
Still, there’s a prevailing sentiment that not every job that opens up is actually open, a sort of hopelessness that’s hard to shake.
“For one of us to go and say ‘We have the credentials and we want to be at the forefront of a (Class AAAA) school,’ I think that’s when everyone involved has to examine themselves and ask ‘What if?’ and ‘What would we do?’ ” Robinson said. “If you have a quality guy coming through and, say, the minority enrollment at your school is under 5 percent, do you really want a minority to be the face of your program? It’s an easy question and answer until you’re faced with it.”
Mindset shift
Not too long ago, Louisville, Ky., had a problem that reached much greater depths than the current predicament in Pittsburgh.
In 2001, in the largest and most diverse city in the state, not a single high school had an African-American head football coach. At the time, Floyd Keith, then the executive director of the Black Coaches & Administrators organization based in Indianapolis, used the same word to describe Louisville’s coaching demographics that Smith did for Pittsburgh’s — embarrassing.
Nine years later, the situation was drastically different, as 40 percent of the city’s public school programs were led by an African-American. What had been a stark landscape for minorities morphed into one permeated by hope and a sense of opportunity.
The forces behind such a radical shift were not a firm set of rules, but rather a mindset.
“Principals and athletic directors are going to get who they feel like is the best person, regardless of race,” said Jerry Wyman, head of athletics for Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky. “But at the same time, one of the things I preach to athletic directors every year is that we’re a diverse school system and our coaching staffs need to reflect our population of kids.”
While the Rooney Rule revolutionized NFL coaching searches and the NCAA purports to take an active role in promoting diversity, high school athletic associations aren’t dealing with multibillion-dollar enterprises or major universities. They either don’t want to or don’t have the power to put mandates in place that require schools to interview at least one minority candidate for a job opening.
The PIAA, for example, is a voluntary organization, so even if schools were open to requirements such as the Rooney Rule, many wonder about its feasibility.
“In regard to anything other than those rules, there’s no reference,” WPIAL executive director Tim O’Malley said of the state’s coaching requirements. “I’m sure they’re not going to go down that path.”
In an email, PIAA executive director Bob Lombardi added that coaching hires are the sole matter of the local school and that the PIAA “has no say in the matter since these are personnel issues.”
Given those facts, Pittsburgh schools will be faced with the same challenge Wyman was nearly a decade ago – if minority coaching numbers are going to improve, it will have to be done organically.
Among coaches, there’s some sense that could happen, even without the implementation of rules.
Six of the nine minority coaches in the area were hired within the past four years, an indication that schools with recent openings have been willing to turn to an African-American.
And the current crop of minority coaches has done its part in helping pave the way for others who hope to find their way in the profession.
Almost two months ago, Wade became the first African-American coach to win a WPIAL football championship since at least 1979, which is as far back as Post-Gazette records go. Clairton ultimately fell in the PIAA championship Dec. 12, its only loss of the season.
In six seasons at Jeannette, Roy Hall has a 47-17 record. This past season, Adams had moribund Southmoreland on the verge of ending a 35-year playoff drought. Washington took Moon to the playoffs in consecutive years after the Tigers went 8-47 from 2007-12. Despite that success, he was fired Dec. 3 after being told that the school wanted to “go in another direction.”
Most any time a topic such as minority misrepresentation comes up, however, so do questions surrounding its importance.
For scholars such as Lapchick who have devoted their lives to studying it, it’s a matter of perspective, of bringing as many people with as many different backgrounds as possible to the proverbial table.
To players, young men at a fragile juncture of their lives, it can be as simple as having someone in a position of authority to look up to.
“He knows everything we’re going through before we even go through it,” Clairton senior Ju’Juan Jackson said of Wade. “He knows what to tell us when it happens because he’s been through it or he knows people that have been through it.”
It’s a responsibility Wade cherishes, even if it presents challenges. He walked the same halls and streets that his players do today and the man who grew up a few blocks from Clairton’s Millvue Acres housing projects serves as an example of what’s possible, of what these young men surrounded by uncertainty can become.
Wade had to wait years to get to this moment, and as his career continues, he carries a torch, for the 30 players who line up for him and, perhaps unwittingly, for minority coaches like himself.
“I want to try to help these kids get out of the poverty, to try to get out of the environment so they can have success and then come back and get some more,” Wade said.
“To me, that’s what it’s all about.”
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Information from: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, https://www.post-gazette.com
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