I agreee with hire the best coach. My issue is that many times that it is used as an excuse to not even give the Black coach a chance. It took a Rooney rule and the Rooney’s to go out on a limb to give Mike Tomlin a chance. Now, he is considered one of the best coaches in the NFL. Giving Dawn Staley a chance coming from Temple and barely out of the WNBA was considered radical. She, also, could have easily been put in the box of a great player can’t possibly be a good coach. A National Championship, 3 Final Four appearances, and about six SEC championships later that line of thinking seems short-sighted at best. People try to just say that black players are more gifted in an attempt to use that as an excuse to limit their opportunities intellectually. However, a remember a time when Blacks didn’t get an opportunity athletically either. The same excuses you hear with coaching opportunities were the same excuses you heard with allowing them to play. I was around when the word was that you couldn’t let Black players play or play certain positions because they didn’t have the mental capacity. Even when it got better, I remember the notion that you could have only 2 Black players on the Basketball starting five at a time. What I have found is that most race issues are not out of hate. It is out of fear. It is a fear that if we give this other group an opportunity, where are my opportunities going to come from? My thought is that it frees us to find the very best possible no matter where it comes from. My issues have never been with white coaches being hired. It’s been with them being hired in an incomplete process based on racial stereotypes that should be a part of our past.
