Black Female Coaches Few and Far Between

Hoyas Coach Terri Williams-Flournoy

C. Vivian Stringer of Rutgers remembers sitting at a recent Black Coaches Association meeting and hearing the statistics on the number of black women coaching college basketball. Even more troubling to Stringer was the number of high-profile programs that had once employed black women as coaches and no longer did.

"I was just so upset within my heart," Stringer said. "I felt my heart racing. There was so much I wanted to say. . . . When you think about that, that's an incredible wipeout. It bothers me. It's like we were set back 20 years."

Stringer, the only women's coach to lead three schools to the Final Four, is one of only a handful of black women coaching Division I basketball. In the 2004-05 season, 24 of the 325 Division I women's basketball programs -- excluding Historically Black Colleges and Universities -- had black female head coaches. Of the 64 teams in this year's NCAA tournament, only four are coached by black women, and one of those schools is considered an HBCU.

"I think, other than college football, the worst situation as far as opportunities for people of color as both head and assistant coaches is women's college basketball," said Richard Lapchick, who has compiled the Racial and Gender Report Card since the late 1980s.

In a sport in which 41.6 percent of the players are black, less than 8 percent of the coaches are black women. By comparison, 58.2 percent of men's college basketball players and nearly 25 percent of coaches are black.

Those involved in the sport cite various reasons for the disparity: (1) athletic directors, 85 percent of whom are white men, tend to hire from their group of associates, which typically doesn't include many black females; (2) the growth of the women's game has made coaching jobs more lucrative and attractive, drawing increasing interest for male coaches, black and white; and (3) while participation numbers are up 6 percent from five years ago, the number of black women playing college basketball has traditionally been low, meaning the pool of former players taking an interest in coaching is not deep.

"They've all spoken about how Title IX helped women," BCA Executive Director Floyd Keith said. "It hasn't helped African-American women."

All of this makes the situation at Georgetown remarkable. First-year Hoyas coach Terri Williams-Flournoy can claim the only all-black woman staff in Division I. With assistants Niki Reid, Christy Winters Scott and Alisha Mosley, Georgetown has as many black female coaches as the entire Patriot League and one more than all of the Mountain West Conference. The Big Sky does not have a black woman on the staff of any of its eight schools.

Williams-Flournoy said she wasn't trying to make a stand, and after realizing what she had done, she became concerned about others' perceptions.

"It's never happened before," Williams-Flournoy said. "Here I am, a new coach. There is unfortunately a little biased opinion out there. You just never know."

Georgetown was not the first head coaching position Williams-Flournoy tried to obtain. She applied for jobs at Oklahoma State and Providence and was offered a job at a low-major school in New York, but turned it down. When Richmond didn't call her for its opening three years ago, she was hurt.

"I didn't even get a look at Richmond," Williams-Flournoy said. "I didn't get a phone call or nothing. I'm thinking, 'Okay, my home town, my brother is right there. I know the area. I've got everything, and I can't even get a phone call.' I think it has a lot to do with ADs. They know who they want. Eventually, I heard [the Richmond athletic director] wanted an ACC assistant, which puts us [black women] at another disadvantage, because how many blacks are in the ACC?"

The 11-member ACC has no black female head coaches and 12 full-time assistant coaches who are black women.

Reid turned down head coaching jobs at Long Island and Colgate. Winters Scott applied for 20 to 30 jobs after she was let go by Maryland when Chris Weller retired. She was out of coaching for two seasons before joining Georgetown's staff.