Part 4 | The Past and Present of Conscious Coaching
I recently spoke with Professor Scott Brooks, Director of Research at Arizona State University’s Global Sport Institute, about his childhood, his athletics coaching, research interests, and more. Check out part 4 (of 5) of my interview with Dr. Brooks.
(The following interview has been edited for length and clarity)
From my vantage point, being someone who pays attention to this, but also as someone who hasn’t been around too long, it seems like the social consciousness has increased in coaches lately. How do you place the social consciousness of coaches today within the history of coaching? What’s your read on the state of coaching while conscious today?
It's hard to put a number or a thought to that proportion. What I would say is I think there's a huge gap between those who are and who aren't [socially conscious]. You go back to the Mike Rice stories at Rutgers, we see stories just from a couple years back where coaches are using racial slurs at the college level. On the women's side, at Illinois, the coach would pit Black girls versus White girls and basically say, "If we go up against Black teams and the Black girls on our team don't show up... [we’re going to lose]." He literally is putting whether they play well or not on the Black players in particular. And he's assuming that they're all coming from inner city, poor backgrounds. I think there's a huge gap. There are also people coaching and it really is only about winning for them.
You also have a dynamic today where to be a coach of color and be a community-level coach is complicated. When a coach of color is doing the community service that the university and the job requires, such as going into the Boys and Girls Club, you better make sure you're doing that in addition to anything you might do that might be for communities of color specifically. Today, you can't just do work for communities of color as a coach with a public profile. So that would be one aspect that I would think about.
I think the other consideration is, with the concern for getting the best players, they're not always getting those players who are most academically prepared, or they just haven't been investing as much in their education. So that changed for coaches because if you're on shorter contracts then you've just got to win now, even though you may want to be more “civic-minded,” meaning that we can see not only what they do outside of the program, but what they're doing with their athletes of color.
You have more kids who are just saying, "I'm only here to make it to the league." And so even if you want to pour into them in other ways, some of them are just not that receptive. They don't care about that. I think that it's a player thing as well. Parents may or may not care because they just want the kid to go to the league too. But what you'll hear from certain coaches, such as my coaching network in Philly, they’ll say, “We've been taking kids to get registered for voting since the 70s, 80s, and 90s. This is just a thing that Black coaches have done for a long time." You look at the John Thompsons, the John Chaneys, the Nolan Richardsons, the Black Coaches Association that was around in the 80s; I don't see us as having that kind of visible presence of this kind of coaching until recently. And they fought things such as Proposition 48 and said, "This is going to have a disproportionate impact on Black players." I mean, they were really about that. And then we kind of saw a lull. The Black Coaches Association dies. I remember trying to track people down and nobody responded. They don't have an office or a person that's watching the phones or the emails. It just dissipated.
Today we have Dawn Staley, who has been and is a leading voice, if not the leading voice for Black coaches, talking about what Black people are going through in society and pushing for the media to recognize what her team, which is predominantly Black women, are doing. C. Vivian Stringer is another coach who’s always done the right things, but Vivian Stringer was a contemporary of John Chaney and coached with Chaney at Cheyney State. So they've always done things like voting registration and doing things for Black communities or making sure that their Black players are thinking beyond the court.
I think you used to be able to assume that the majority of Black coaches or coaches of color were going to be more civic-minded or community-minded, but with the professionalization, with that kind of visibility, with extensions being given to assistant coaches for their recruiting record and the number and caliber of players that they get, they've stopped worrying about it. Assistants in the past would be just as a civic-minded. Assistants now, many of them are much more professional-minded. And they don't think they have to do that because they realize that that's not what they're asked to do.
Assistant coaches are asked to recruit and recruiting is what comes first. And they also want to coach and deal with the X's and O's, so that doesn't leave so much time. They've got so much to do to recruit the next players. So I think it's the pipeline issue now that you may have head coaches that are civic-minded. Some of them will tell you, "I’ve got to wait ‘til I'm a head coach," but, our head coaching numbers [of Black coaches] aren't going up. So you got all these assistants that are underneath and they don't feel like they have the flexibility and time, or they feel like they don’t get rewarded for it, so why do it. There's less pressure, so there's less of that kind of a mindset.