Georgia’s hiring record for minority head football coaches, while improving, has a long way to go, according to many state-wide minority coaches and administrators. That is especially the case in the Georgia High School Association’s highest classification and private schools.
In Class 7A last season, eight of 45 head football coaches were African-American, and none worked at the 34 schools whose student bodies were at least 15% white. Three of 47 private school teams had minority coaches. Two were replaced with white coaches this offseason, and the other coach and his team are moving to another state association this fall, leaving the GHSA currently with no minority head coaches for its private school football teams in 2022.
“Minority coaches have to come into a situation that’s bad and make it good, but aren’t given resources,” said Jesse Hicks, in his 19th year as a Georgia head coach, the past five at Baldwin in Milledgeville. “We would love to go to a program with 20 coaches and a six-figure salary, but a lot of minority coaches aren’t given those opportunities.”
Hicks, who is African-American, believes stereotypes get in the way.
“The biggest problem,” he said, “is the perception that people have: ‘Yeah, Black coaches, they can motivate. They can discipline. But I don’t know how good they’ll be with X’s and O’s.’”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution completed an analysis of the makeup of head football coaches in Georgia. Overall, 29.5% of the GHSA’s 424 football teams had minority coaches in 2021. That’s an increase from the 23% in 2010. Four of the minority coaches won state titles, out of eight, last season. That’s the most ever.
Credit: Photo illustration by ArLuther Lee
Credit: Photo illustration by ArLuther Lee
The Georgia numbers stand out compared with those in the NFL or college football. Only two of 32 NFL teams and 14 of 131 FBS college teams have African-American head coaches after offseason hires.
Half the GHSA’s minority head coaches last season worked in urban or inner-city schools, where resources can be sparse, and minority coaches were markedly underrepresented at the GHSA’s largest public and private schools, according to AJC research.
Majority white schools were more than six times less likely to employ minority coaches than majority minority schools were to employ white coaches, and new minority coaches were significantly less likely to inherit winning teams as new white coaches were.
“The grade that I would give Georgia is a ‘C’ because the jobs that most minority coaches are getting still are in metro areas or African-American belt areas in the state,” said Ahmand Tinker, the executive director of the Minority Coaches Association of Georgia. “Georgia has gotten better, to a certain extent, but not overall. I still believe that minority coaches will never get a fair shake on many upper-echelon or prestigious jobs.”
Credit: File Photo
Credit: File Photo
The NFL came under fire this month when former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed a racial discrimination lawsuit and said the New York Giants gave him a token interview to meet minority quotas after they planned to hire another head coach. Before the latest hiring cycle, only one NFL team had a African-American head coach (Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin) despite the league’s Rooney Rule.
Georgia high school football is doing better on the surface. The GHSA’s 424 football-playing schools employed 125 minority head coaches (29.5%) in 2021, compared with 95 of 405 (23%) in 2010, the last time the AJC did the research. Of the 55 jobs filled this offseason, 19 have gone to minorities. Eleven of the newly hired minority coaches are replacing white coaches.
In 2021, minority coaches got 37 of the 99 new head positions and inherited winning teams 22% of the time. Their new teams averaged 2.7 victories the season before. The 63 new white coaches inherited winning teams 37% of the time, and their new teams averaged 4.5 victories the previous season.
About half of the GHSA’s minority coaches (62 of the 125) worked last season in inner-city or urban public schools in Fulton, DeKalb, Clayton, Muscogee, Bibb, Richmond, Dougherty and Chatham counties.
Schools with majority-white populations employed minority coaches 7.6% of the time (16 of 211 teams). Schools with majority African-American populations employed white coaches 30.6% of the time (41 of 134). Schools with majority-minority student bodies, including the majority African-American schools, had white coaches 48.8% of the time.
Multiple minority coaches who were contacted for this story declined comment on the record, fearing it could hurt them professionally.
“I’m not about to let these folks black-ball me, so I have to accept it,” one said. “Schools are used to white coaches, so they stick with white coaches. If you took my name off (an application) and had only my qualifications and winning percentage, I’d be one of the first ones called. We’re just as college educated as our white counterparts, but we’re disqualified.”
The NFL adopted the Rooney Rule in 2003. It requires every team with a head coaching vacancy to interview at least one or more diverse candidates. In 2009, the Rooney Rule was expanded to include general manager jobs and equivalent front-office positions. The GHSA has no rules to guide hiring coaches. School boards make those decisions.
“Those are local issues, but I’d certainly encourage those local districts to conduct coaching searches and interview process that are inclusive for all,” GHSA executive director Robin Hines said. “While there’s been progress, we certainly have a way to go. I recognize the struggles and frustrations.”
Hines, a former superintendent and head football coach, said he would welcome a meeting with the Minority Coaches Association or others to discuss their concerns and how the GHSA could help.
Minority coaches are winning at the GHSA’s highest levels more than ever. During the past six seasons, 12 of 48 GHSA football champions (25%) have had minority head coaches. From 2000 to 2015, only 8% of state title-winning coaches were minorities. From 1970 to 1999, it was 6%.
Credit: File Photo
Credit: File Photo
The four minority coaches who won state titles last season were Bryant Appling of Buford, Marquis Westbrook of Warner Robins, John Adams of Cedar Grove and Maurice Freeman of Brooks County. Three other minorities coached in the eight finals: Carver-Atlanta’s Darren Myles, Carver-Columbus’s Corey Joyner and Langston Hughes’ Daniel Williams.
Buford and Warner Robins, two of the state’s blue-blood programs, never had minority head coaches until hiring Appling and Westbrook, each in 2019.
Appling helped Buford break its five-year championship drought. He’s the first coach in GHSA history to win state titles in each of his first three seasons. Westbrook has won state titles in two of his three seasons. The 2020 title was Warner Robins’ first since 2004.
Tinker applauded those hires but stopped short of calling them game-changers.
“They were on staff, so it’s not like they were outsiders,” Tinker said. “Both sides already established a comfort level with each other. Research suggests that big-time schools hire minority coaches once the program is at its lowest point, or bottom of the barrel, or when a new school is built and established, which diverts resources to other sports, other schools or stops completely.”
Warner Robins and Buford also are far more diverse in their student bodies than when they emerged as state powers, Warner Robins in the 1970s and Buford this century. Appling is the state’s only minority head football coach at a traditional power that is more than 35% white.
Credit: File Photo
Credit: File Photo
Still, Tinker acknowledges some progress. The growth of his Minority Coaches Association, formed in 2010, has corresponded to the increasing numbers of minority head coaches. The group provides workshops and training to develop coaches’ skills, including interviewing, and facilitates networking with high school and college administrators and coaches. When asked, the group helps schools hiring coaches to identify qualified minority candidates.
Burke County coach Eric Parker, in his 24th season as a head coach, believes minorities are getting better opportunities than when he became a head coach in 1997 but adds, “We’re not there yet.”
Parker recalls a conversation with the late Butch Brooks, a white coach at Washington-Wilkes who was Parker’s coaching mentor in the early 1990s. According to Parker, Brooks told him that schools tend to hire coaches they are comfortable with outside of the game of football. Parker said Brooks was optimistic times would change to give Parker a better chance.
Parker got the Burke County job in 2007 and won the school’s first state title in 2011. He was the 11th minority head coach to win a GHSA football title. There have been 15 since.
Credit: File Photo
Credit: File Photo
Myles, the coach at 2021 Class 3A runner-up Carver-Atlanta, said he was pleasantly surprised this offseason when he got a call from the athletic director at Archer, a Class 7A school in Gwinnett County that has reached the second round of the playoffs or better the past five seasons and played for a state title in 2014.
Myles chose to stay at Carver, where he has been since 2005, but the genuine interest bolstered his confidence that he’d get a fair shot at a bigger, successful program.
“We do not take race into consideration for any positions, but rather strive to find the best candidate,’' said Archer athletic director Tim Watkins, a white administrator who formerly served as Archer’s boys basketball coach. “We did receive much interest in our football vacancy, and we also reached out to good candidates such as Coach Myles. That being said, after interviewing a diverse group of excellent coaches, we are excited to have Dante Williams joining us as only the second coach in the history of Archer football.”
Williams, a minority, was the offensive coordinator at Class 7A champion Collins Hill.
Myles said he couldn’t explain why more Class 7A schools didn’t have minority coaches.
“The people who need to be interviewed are those doing the hiring, those in 7A and private schools that are pretty much hiring white coaches, just to find out whether they’re looking for the best coach or somebody who identifies with the majority of the race on the team,” Myles said.
Most minority coaches said more dialogue is needed.
“We need to have a conversation with the GHSA, the superintendents, the principals,” Baldwin’s Hicks said. “Open up the conversation. People don’t like to have tough conversations. Nobody wants to say we don’t hire you because you’re African-American, but when you look at the numbers, that’s exactly what’s happening. You have to admit you have a problem.”
When he was asked about possible solutions, Hicks said: “Work resistance. If Black coaches and players would simply stop working until their demands are met or some real-change conversations happen.”
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