Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers
Whilst Paul Ince may be the only black manager in the English top flight, over in the US, there are a number of high-profile black coaches in all three of the country’s most popular sports.
Baseball, widely regarded as ‘America’s pastime, currently has five black managers in its 30-team league.
The most prominent of the five is Toronto Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston, who was recently reappointed at the team after leading them to two consecutive World Series titles in his previous tenure, becoming the first ever black manager to win a World Series.
Another celebrated black manager in Major League Baseball is Cincinatti Reds manager Dusty Baker, who became the club’s first ever minority manager when he took over last year, and has previously taken the San Francisco Giants to a World Series.
The three other black MLB managers are Texas Rangers’ Ron Washington, the New York Mets’ interim manager Jerry Manuel and the Houston Astros’ Cecil Cooper.
Strides
The NFL, meanwhile, has made great strides in recent times, with the 2007 Super Bowl being contested by two black coaches, the first time in the competition’s forty-one year history that one black coach had reached the final, let alone two.
As well as the Chicago Bears’ Lovie Smith and the Indianapolis Colts’ Tony Dungy, the two coaches who contested the 2007 Super Bowl, there are a further five black coaches in the NFL.
Those coaches are Cincinnati Bengals’ Marvin Lewis, Cleveland Browns’ Romeo Crennel, Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin, Kansas City Chiefs’ Herman Edwards, and recently appointed San Francisco 49ers’ interim head coach and Hall of Fame ex-pro Mike Singletary.
The ‘Rooney Rule’, established in 2003 and named after Pittsburgh Steelers’ owner Dan Rooney, chairman of the NFL’s diversity committee, requires every NFL team to interview a minority candidate for any head coaching vacancy.
Factors
The rule is widely-believed to be one of the main factors in the recent increase in black head coaches, and there are currently three-times as many black coaches in the league than there were before the rule was introduced in 2003.
The third major American sports association, basketball’s NBA, also has a healthy number of black head coaches, and this season’s NBA finals saw the Boston Celtics’ Doc Rivers become the first black coach to take his team to an NBA title for over 20 years.
However, whilst black coaches in professional sports may be flourishing, there are still concerns being raised about the number of minority coaches at college level.
The recent firing of University of Washington football head coach Tyrone Willingham left just five black head coaches from a pool of over a hundred major college football programmes.
When that statistic is added to the fact that 50% of college football players are black, there are clearly still a number of barriers still to break down before American sports can truly claim to be integrated.
