Coaching Diversity in Sports
Sports is the pinnacle entertainment around the world and especially in America but an issue that has been ongoing for quite some time now is how small the diversity is among coaches on teams. Most of the pro sports teams and collegiate level sports coaches’ demographics is middle age white Anglo-Saxon men. In 4 major sports leagues the percentage of minority coaches is at most all together about 20 percent which is a very small number. In the NFL, MLB, and college football minority head coaches represent about 3-10 percent while the NBA has the biggest representation which is about 12-40 percent which is a gradual big difference. This is taken to account all minorities specifically black but other minorities like women, Latinos, and other races percentage representations are even smaller than that. In the society that we live in today where barriers are breaking literally every day this number is appalling. In recent years’ sports commissioners have tried to diversify their coaching in their leagues we have more minorities being hired but they are basically replacing the ones that are getting fired.
Some recent success has been the NBA hiring the first ever full time assistant coach for an NBA team the San Antonio Spurs Becky Hammon has been a trailblazer and climbing up the NBA ladder. Even in football women are becoming a more familiar face to see on the sidelines not as coaches but as trainers, strength and conditioning type roles so some progress is being made but a lot of work still needs to be done. I think the root of the issue with sports not being so diverse is that the people in power of these sports leagues and teams are old school men raised up in the 40’s and 50’s who are wealthy owners that just have not got with the times of the new age. These men are set in their ways and until new blood comes in they will stay stuck in their ways and little progress will be made.
Some ideas to move sports leagues into being more diverse is maybe giving a quota that their needs to be this percentage of minority coaches in leagues or the whole league gets fined. This idea forces leagues to recruit and seek minority coaches and in a lot of times minority coaches are highly qualified more qualified than the majority coaches but are never given the chance. There is so many different ideas we could try to fix this issue just by giving those deserving and qualified members a chance to prove themselves as coaches. Also, with more diverse coaches comes different styles of play and ideas for those coaches to influence their teams making competition more exciting to watch and attract more people that maybe sports don’t attract, just because they have a woman coaching a male team or a Black or Latino coaching a team like BYU or Yale. The more spectators and higher TV ratings the more money that the teams and their owners are making and that’s really all the wealthy old owners care about in the end is making money.
In the end a solution and progress needs to happen soon with the recent current events that are going on in society today sports are one the last sources of entertainment that has been around the longest that needs to conform and start making these changes for the better because they will not hurt in the long run sports has stood the test of time.