Sports Training
Coaching Diversity in Sports
Sports are mainstream entertainment around the world and especially in America, but a problem that has been around for quite some time now is how little diversity there is among team coaches. The majority of professional sports teams and the demographics of college-level sports coaches are middle-aged white Anglo-Saxon men. In 4 major sports leagues, the percentage of minority coaches is at most 20 percent, which is a very small number. In the NFL, MLB, and minority college football head coaches make up about 3 to 10 percent, while the NBA has the largest representation, which is about 12 to 40 percent, which is a large gradual difference. This is taken into account for all specifically black minorities, but other minorities, such as women, Latinos, and other races, the percentage representations are even smaller than that. In the society we live in today, where barriers are being broken literally every day, this number is attractive. In recent years, the sports commissioners have tried to diversify their coaching in their leagues, we have more minorities hired, but they are basically replacing those who are being laid off.
A recent success has been the NBA hiring the first full-time assistant coach for an NBA team, the San Antonio Spurs. Becky Hammon has been a pioneer and has climbed the NBA ladder. Even in soccer women are becoming a more familiar face to watch on the sidelines not as coaches but as coaches strength and conditioning type roles so some progress is being made but there is still a lot of work to do. I think the root of the problem that sports are not that diverse is that the people in power of these sports leagues and teams are old school men raised in the ’40s and ’50s who are wealthy homeowners who just haven’t adapted. to the times of the new age. These men are set in their ways and until new blood comes in, they will remain stuck in their ways and little progress will be made.
Some ideas for making sports leagues more diverse is maybe giving a quota that their needs is this percentage of minority coaches in the leagues or that the entire league is finished. This idea forces leagues to recruit and seek out minority coaches, and many times minority coaches are highly qualified, more qualified than majority coaches, but they are never given the opportunity. There are so many different ideas that we could try to get around this problem simply by giving qualified, serving members a chance to prove themselves as coaches. Also, with more diverse coaches come different styles of play and ideas for those coaches to influence their teams, making the competition more exciting to watch and attract more people that maybe sports don’t, just because they have a woman. coaching a men’s team or a Black or Latino coaching a team like BYU or Yale. The more viewers and higher TV ratings, the more money teams and their owners make and that’s really all rich former owners care about in the end is making money.
In the end, a solution and progress must happen soon with the recent current events that are happening in today’s society. Sports is one of the last sources of entertainment that has been around the longest and you need to adapt and start making these changes for the better because they won’t hurt in the long run sport has stood the test of time.