When he hired Jackie Robinson to break the racial barrier in baseball in 1947, Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers at the time, described having two things on his mind. “My only purpose is to be fair to all people,” he said, “and my selfish objective is to win baseball games.”
The marriage of equality and excellence in American sport has been a gradual and uneven project ever since. While racial barriers have fallen on the field, integration has taken far longer to reach the manager’s office. Two recent hirings mark how that is changing.
In December, two historically Black schools, Delaware State University and Norfolk State University in Virginia, each tapped a former professional player to run its football program. The appointments confirm something of a trend. Five years ago, Jackson State University, a historically Black school in Mississippi, hired former NFL star Deion Sanders as head coach.
Like Mr. Sanders, DeSean Jackson and Michael Vick were hired to fix losing teams. Like Mr. Sanders, they start with little coaching experience. But they bring – as Mr. Sanders did – personal records of broken records. In just two years, Mr. Sanders led a team that had six consecutive losing seasons to a 12-1 record in 2022.
Delaware and Norfolk are hoping for similar transformations. Their desire to build winning programs is rooted in a deeper purpose. According to the National Collegiate Athletics Association, the number of Black football head coaches “is only about a third of what one might expect given the share of Black student-athletes in football.”
The country’s HBCUs were created to cultivate academic excellence and promote advancement for formerly enslaved people and their descendants. The schools now hope to achieve the same outcomes in athletics. As Bishop Kim Brown, a member of Norfolk’s board of visitors, said when Mr. Vick was introduced, “Today, we put on full display the mission of HBCUs, especially our school. We provide opportunity.”
Leveling opportunity in sport, on the field as well as on the sidelines, writes David Grenardo, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, breaks down barriers by showing that excellence has nothing to do with identity. It is innate in all individuals, as Mr. Sanders tells his players, and is nurtured through discipline, humility, and selflessness.
“Sports provide a reflection of society and its many facets, which include racism,” Professor Grenardo wrote in the Harvard Journal of Sports & Entertainment Law in 2021. “Sports can also reflect the beauty of society through healing and transforming the world in a positive manner.”
On Monday, the University of Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman will be the first Black head coach to lead a team into the national college football championship. That milestone might have held a particular poignance for Branch Rickey. When everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed, all of society wins.
