African Americans Making Little Progress in College Sports Administration

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida recently released its annual report on racial equality in college athletics. The scorecard gave a grade of C+ for racial diversity in college’s sport programs. Two years ago, college sports received a grade of B on racial diversity efforts.

Richard Lapchick, director of TIDES and the lead author of the report, stated that college sports which has “had difficulty increasing opportunities for people of color, faced further challenges in this reporting period as it experienced a decrease in racial hiring. College sport still had the lowest grade for racial hiring practices among all of the college and professional sports covered by the respective Racial and Gender Report Cards” compiled by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.

• In Division I, African Americans make up more than 53 percent of the male student athletes in basketball and more than 44 percent in football, but Blacks are only 3.7 percent of the baseball student athletes.
• Blacks are 44 percent of the football players in Division I but only 7.7 percent of the head football coaches.
• African Americans are 7.6 percent of all head coaches for men’s teams and 7.5 percent of head coaches for women’s teams in Division I. They are 22.3 percent of the head coaches for men’s basketball in Division I. In the 2005-06 season, African Americans were 25.2 percent of all head coaches for men’s basketball in Division I. African Americans are only 1.1 percent of all head coaches in Division I baseball.
• All conference commissioners for schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision are White.
• Blacks are 9.1 percent of athletic directors at Division I institutions but African American have lower representation among athletic directors at Division II and Division III colleges and universities.
• Blacks are 2 percent of the sports information directors at Division I NCAA member institutions.

The full report, The 2017 College Sport Racial and Gender Scorecard, can be downloaded by clicking here.