Its name is the Black Coaches Association, but its mission concerns more than coaches. It easily could be called the Student-Athletes and Black Coaches Association.
“We’re concerned with our kids — the direction that the NCAA is taking and its impact on our kids,” said Marian Washington, Kansas women’s basketball coach and president of the BCA.
The BCA boycotted a National Association of Basketball Coaches issues summit last week in part to bring attention to reduction in scholarships by the NCAA and a planned raising of ACT and SAT standards.
“We just don’t want to find ourselves in a situation very soon down the road where we will have legislated our young kids right out of the system, right out of the opportunity to earn an athletic scholarship,” Washington said.
“I am just very, very concerned that we keep legislating and legislating without allowing research to demonstrate whether legislation like Proposition 48 has worked before we legislate something else.”
Washington said Proposition 48, which set ACT and SAT standards, served a purpose.
“The research has shown that it was very successful,” she said, “giving a young person a chance to get into the school system, giving them the opportunity to have a good support system around them so they can be successful in college. It’s been proven.
“I just don’t know, and I think most of the coaches who are involved don’t understand why, then, it’s been necessary to continue to legislate even stiffer standards. There’s no question everybody knows a tremendous percentage of our society that will be impacted is going to be our young African-Americans.”
Certainly there are other issues that concern the BCA, but none are more important than those that deal with students, Washington stressed.
“It’s important to capture the real thrust behind any efforts made by this association,” she said. “And our efforts deal strictly with the young people.
“When I listen to the comments by some of our more visible black coaches, like John Thompson and John Chaney and Nolan Richardson, it’s clear that we don’t want to ever look back in history and say that we did not do our best to make the changes necessary to protect our kids.”
Other issues concerning the BCA are the number of minorities in coaching and the absence of black executives in the NCAA.
The BCA would also like to see more black head football coaches in NCAA Division I-A.
“I would say there’s been very little progress,” Washington said. “Because once you get past the fact there are not many Division One head coaches, you need to look at how many black assistant coaches are in positions where their next step could put them in a head coaching job — which means they need to be a defensive coordinator or an offensive coordinator.
“If a university was looking at an opening in a head football position, there may not be that large a number of black applicants. But why not? We’re just not doing the job at the next level. We’re not helping them to get into assistant coaching positions where they could, in fact, compete for those head jobs.”
Washington, in her second one-year team as the BCA’s president, said the organization would like to hire a full-time executive director. Drake basketball coach Rudy Washington is currently the BCA’s director.
“We’re at a point where we really need a full-time person,” Marian Washington said. “That’s what we’re working very hard to have happen this next year. I’d like to think that by the convention in May of next year that we’ll be in a position to hire a full-time person.”
Washington has also made it a point to consult with the BCA’s membership, which currently stands at about 3,000.
“One of the major concerns in the past has been a lack of communication among its membership,” she said. “Last year I worked real hard to try to improve on that.”
Its annual convention is an important event for the BCA.
“We’ll have workshops during a convention to help young coaches understand how to better prepare themselves for a job interview,” Washington said. “We’ll have experts come in to handle that and actually go through a mock interview. The whole idea is to help each other in getting to a point where we’re better prepared to compete for these positions.”
Of course, money is always an issue.
“A primary concern of mine,” the KU coach said, “was to identify a financial avenue through which we could generate the monies necessary to eventually hire a full-time person, and we have done that.”
Washington has also seen the effects of NCAA-mandated reduction in coaching staffs.
“For women in general,” Washington said, “and most especially for African-American women, when you take away a graduate assistantship, it really hurts in preparing women to move into this business and eventually get into the head coaching positions. It just cuts us out. And it’s a concern that the BCA shares, both men and women.
“I understand in terms of cost reduction, but when you realize it’s very difficult to help women get into this business, and then to take away an entry . . . It really hurts us.
“At the high school level, it was predicted that by the year 2000, you may not see a woman coaching a girls high school team. The men vs. women at that level is just way out of line. It’s a real concern.”
But it’s not the No. 1 concern, according to Washington.
“The focus has got to be on the No. 1 issue. We are concerned about our young people,” she said. “We’ve worked extremely hard to get away from coaches being worried about whether they’ve got a player here or a player there. We need to focus on what’s going to be best for our young people.”
And what’s best, she says, isn’t reduction of scholarships or raising of college entrance test score requirements.
“Our efforts,” she said, “will be to propose things to help protect the opportunity for our young people to go on to college.”