A coaches perspective

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As I'm reading further on in Taboo, an interesting spin that it takes is that even though African Americans are dominating the sports as time goes on, the corporate leaders and coaches are all mainly in white hands still. This pushed me to want to research about a coaches perception on racial barriers in sports, so that is where my research headed to next.
I started by looking at the statistics of white coaching staff in the sports industry, and narrowed it down to just looking at the National Football League. The numbers that I found were only 3-9% of the total coaches in the NFL since 2013. With research done, I realized that the only reason that this percentage went up was because of the Rooney Rule[2] that was put into place. This basically says that the policy requires league teams to interview African American candidates for head coaching and senior operation jobs as well. This was because of the long history of giving African Americans opportunities to serve in team leadership roles.
Black coaches, as a whole, have not been successful in the four major sports. When blacks have held head coaching or managerial positions, their performance has been disappointing, especially in basketball. In professional football and baseball, there are a few success stories, but white coaches generally have better records. Blacks often complain that they are underrepresented in coaching positions because of “racism.” The real explanation is that few of them have the ability for these  challenging jobs, and that is the justification I found as to why the percentages for this positions are so low. As I move further on in my research, I feel that it is important to note that by getting the perspective of coaches as well really helped me become even more intrigued in color barriers in sports and how they are slowly being broken over time, not just with athletes but with coaches as well. However, I have come to realize that having a coaches perspective has helped, but I need to refocus back on the athletes that actually broke these barriers to see if I can get anywhere that way. Nonetheless, this research helped me in answering my question about how far African Americans have come since the time of Jesse Owens. Looking back, it was unheard of to a black athlete competing in the Olympic games, let alone to becoming a professional athlete, to now being about to coach other professional athletes too. It honestly gives me goose bumps just thinking about that change in American sports!


[1] Picture. http://content.internetvideoarchive.com/content/photos/1223/nfl.JPG
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule