Part 5 | Coaching the Coaches
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 5 (of 5) of my interview with Dr. Brooks.
(The following interview has been edited for length and clarity)
You are also someone who coaches other coaches, pulling both from your sociological research on race and sport, and your own personal experiences. I want you to put on your “coach the coaches” hat. Sport is certainly a place where race matters, so to start, could you educate us on what “race” is?
First and foremost, race is a social construction – humans haven't existed long enough for us to have "sub-species," which is how White supremacy has defined and interacted with people of color to fit into their racial/ethnic hierarchy. Race is used to justify hierarchies and social stratification. Skin color doesn't commit actions – people do and they do so within a socio-structural and cultural context.
Race changes. Look at the census over time and the different categories for race that have been used, including the current "Non-Hispanic White" category. This is modern and didn't exist in the 1980s. Race is political. Racial categorization happens to you. There's a book, “How the Irish Became White” by Noel Ignatiev, that describes the use of racialization for power – the Irish were granted whiteness after first being called "White N------" because there were too many Black people and Irish were needed for numbers and political gain.
Thank you. I think it’s important to ground us in that definition because I think so many people, coaches included, know that “racism” is bad, but we don’t actually know what race is, or why it’s not accurate to categorize and then subjugate people along those lines, but we have and we do. In sports, I think even well-meaning coaches still adhere to racialized stereotypes of what athleticism looks like or what it’s based on. The idea that Black folks are more naturally athletic but not as intelligent as White folks, to be explicit.
If you're looking at a coach that has biases, then yeah there are definitely some things to look at, but I don't think that you're going to convince them by talking to them. I think you convince them by showing them how to think about these kids individually and then as a part of this community and get them out of deficit thinking. And then the rest of it, in my estimation, becomes a natural understanding.
So once I get away from thinking "they got a bad attitude," that whole bad attitude thing is everything racialized, right? Even more so than "natural ability," bad attitude gets put on Black kids more than anybody else. It just means, "They don't seem to listen to me. I don't seem to be able to connect." But there are actually times when you actually don't want them to listen. When they take that big shot and I was going to call a time out, I'm glad that that kid didn't listen. So not listening isn't actually the problem, it's controlling them that is the problem. And for me, that's where the disconnect is. My high school coach wanted to control us Black kids. He wanted to stomp out the dog that might be in us, which was an advantage.
I think that for some coaches, you probably could talk them through if they're open to it. I can say, "Here are all the problems with these myths. You know that when you line up high jump world record holders, they're not of African descent, right? When you look at the record holders, in what we are still thinking of as traditional forms of athleticism… you would say jumping is Black, right? The greatest high jumpers have not been Black. There are a few, but that's not the world record owners.” And they’ll say, “Really?”
And I always tell people, basketball is not the jumping sport, volleyball is. So, can volleyball players jump? Hell yeah they can jump. And you go across men's side and women's side, and you're talking about people in China and in Argentina and they don’t necessarily have African descent. I can take you down that route. And if it's that simple and you have changed, then great, you are on the cusp, you're open to it.
I would naturally find myself having some of these conversations with them, looking at how the game has changed. I was speaking with someone about the debate over the best basketball. And I said, “You're looking at today's style; the athletes are very different. But you realize that the style that you're talking about, the passing style, many would call more of a white game, right? It's long distance shooting and passing, when you're talking about the Golden State Warriors, but the Globetrotters brought in the passing game, and the Globetrotters shot half-court shots.” It wasn't appreciated and considered real basketball, but that's a historical fact.
Before Black people could play the NBA, which didn't happen until 1950, they had to go through the Globetrotters. Abe Saperstein had a stronghold. He was able to run a monopoly. Black players were excluded and he was smart enough to be opportunistic to say, "Hey, they can play. I'm gonna make money off of them." And it wasn't until some of the NBA owners thought, "I gotta have them,” and they broke this agreement and started to draft people in the 1950 draft.
So, people have these myths about how basketball is played, and what's White style and Black style. That was Black style play. The fundamentals and having them pivot and running them off of a back cut… like, it's not what people think. And even Europeans – I know someone doing work on European basketball and Black American players. It's crazy to me that European basketball is seen as more fundamentally sound and better than our basketball. But to me it's another form of racism – because it's more white, we claim all of that, but they just played differently because they needed to. Basketball adapts as it goes. It's a living thing. But we still beat them. And we beat them even with their rules. I ask, “How does it work that when you go to Europe and they go, ‘Well, you don't really know how to play basketball.’” Literally, I'm doing the research where these Eastern European coaches are saying, "Yeah, they don't know how to play the game." It's an American game. You're paying them the big money. And we beat you in the Olympics, whenever you put pros against pros, so why do you all get to have the claim of having the right basketball?
There're a lot of ways in which race plays out in those kinds of conversations. So if I'm teaching, then yeah, let's get in the classroom and I can tell you about all of these idiosyncrasies and these myths and we can dispel them. We've got the practical and the applied side that's there.
When you’re coaching coaches and pulling from your sociological knowledge base, can you walk me through how that goes?
The first thing that I do is say, "We're going to spend a lot of time from the outset getting to know the players." What that means is as a group collective, we're going to have conversations of what goes on in their life. Who is at home with them? Do they eat dinner at the dinner table together? When do they eat together? What do their parents do? What are their parents’ names? That gets us a sense of the community that they're coming from. I want to know about their communities. We literally go see them in their home. Go look at the playgrounds where they're playing. We'd want to get to know the old heads that are in their community who have coached them over time. We want to make those kinds of connections so that we're understanding the basketball that they have learned. We want to watch some of those games at the middle school level. That's not for recruiting per se, but just to understand their environment better; when we wonder why they do this or that, or don't use their left hand, we can go and see maybe whether that was a community thing – they were just so strong with one hand and never saw the need to go with their other hand. We may see about their showmanship. Maybe it's a place where the "Oh's and ah's" that come with a crossover are far bigger than just whether or not a person makes a layup, so that may be something that motivates them.
If you’re a coach who just wants to "take the dog out of them," then maybe you shouldn't have these players playing for you. If you just want them to conform and just do what you say, then you don't want these players. I'd encourage the coaches to go to their players’ neighborhoods. Let's talk about their families. Let's get to know them. I need you to be analytical. I want you to think, "Now that I've heard this about them, what can I expect them to do?" It shouldn’t necessarily be a surprise when they go off on a referee if I’ve gone and seen games where the kids are going off on referees. I'm not to judge whether or not they're bad kids. I want to know “How do they see adults?” Referees are institutional agents; they're adults. How they are interacting with adults is going to be linked to what goes on at home and what's going on in their community. So when I understand that, then it's not this whole thing where they want to challenge me. This is how kids and adults are interacting.
I want to see how they interact with their old heads. I can take a page from that. Like if their old head is out there yelling and screaming at refs, rather than judge that, I realize that that keeps the kids from yelling and screaming, so there might be a connection.
Elijah Anderson has it in his book "Code of the Street," that where civil justice is weak, social justice is strong. So when I can't count on the police, lawyers, and the system, then I count on myself and my group to take care of things. We handle it one on one. Kids who are coming from communities where they have to take care of themselves, they're marginalized, and the police are antagonistic––I can watch that and I can see their coach defending them and realize that they're going to need me to protect them. This is not about calling them deviant. And that comes only from me gaining an understanding of where they're coming from. We call that "home culture." And realize that culture is about the things you need to know to make it in your community, to make it in your everyday life. It meets those daily demands. So when I think of it, then I go, "Okay, this person is a fighter. Is that attached to their community? Oh, it is attached to their community. Okay. So I can expect that they are used to fighting.” And this means when I see them being challenged by teammates or teammates saying something disrespectful, this is how they're likely to respond. So if I don't want them to fight, then I need to pay close attention to how people are treating them, mistreating them, and what's going on.
And so it really is about relationships, going into the communities, looking at what these kids bring in as assets, not deficits, and then saying, "So how can I help fit it in between?" Because it's not just them going, "Well, I'm just going to let them go crazy," which you can see some White coaches do. They'll take kids in and they just roll over thinking that's the way to go. That's not providing the structure and that's not going to help the kid when they get out of school and need to go get a job. So you can't just say, "Oh, it's a fighter. So I let him fight." What I said is the kid needs protectors, let me protect. Right? I don't just leave it in the kids' hands. I'm an adult. I am there to mold them. It's going to take time. We have to develop relationships. So a kid may not trust me. I’m an outsider.
You can't do this whole, "Well, I'm only gonna respect you if you respect me." These kids are being adults in their own ways. So I need to go to them with some respect, I've got to ask them about what they see. I've got to allow for them to speak up for themselves. You may not be with kids who are used to their parents setting up their schedules and their after school activities are all dependent upon their parents being able to pay, to take them there and provide support. Those kids don't come with the same kind of ability to stand up for themselves. So that's why I'm saying don't think of those attributes as kids’ deficits. Those other kids have deficits. They're not going to be able to manage adversity like the kids I got. If my kids are used to adversity, I’ve got to see these as assets. I’ve got to think of how I could fit in to help those particular kids.
The training for me would be looking at that. In that way it's not about race. In that regard, race doesn't commit actions, people do. In this context, it is all about race, but it ain't about race. Like you could get beyond race by talking and getting to know the kid. What makes it race is that we live in a racially divided, stratified society, which means you are more likely to see Black people living amongst Black people, than you are to see a middle class Black person living with middle class or upper middle class white people. The stats in terms of segregation – a poor white working class person is more likely to live with middle class and upper middle class white folks than a middle to upper class Black family because of residential segregation.
I advise coaches to talk explicitly about community, about where these kids are coming from, and develop the relationship and trust.
And then I would say that the other part of the training, when you watch shows like “Last Chance U” and so on – there are coaches who are great people, who have had tons of Black players and they've all loved him. And they can be a community, civic-minded coach. But the difference between them and a Claude Gross – and also the coaches in my coaches network are the same – is even if a kid doesn't play sports, we're looking after them. Most of these coaches, yes, they can really be about the kid, but that kid can do something. They're not just out in the community helping all Black kids. In our summer league, we had kids who couldn't "play dead," as it's said. They could not play, but we kept them. So to me, the critical piece of a community coach, particularly at high schools, is when you keep that full roster of kids just because it's better for that kid to be with you for structure than for that kid to be out there on the corner. I care about the kids. It doesn't matter whether they can play ball or not. I care about the kids. And community coaches, if they're really about the community, then they be about all the kids that they can help. Boys, girls, across race, gender, sexuality. I'm just here to help the kids. And in the old school, when you were a teacher or were embedded in a school, you're more likely to be that way. You just care about the kids.