Interview: Dr. Nefertiti Walker & Dr. Scott Brooks on Black Women Coaches in College Basketball

In this episode, Dr. Amira Rose Davis is joined by Dr. Nefertiti Walker, Associate Professor of Sports Management, Vice Chancellor of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer at UMass Amherst, and Dr. Scott Brooks, Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Global Sports Institute at Arizona State University, for a discussion on Black women coaches in women's college basketball. They discuss how race and gender impacts who gets coaching positions, how they get them and the ways white supremacy influences positions of power in women's college basketball.

This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.

Transcript

Amira: Hey, flamethrowers! Welcome to Burn It All Down. Amira here, and I am so excited to be joined in a roundtable conversation with two of the illest minds in the game. And I'm talking of course about Dr. Scott Brooks and Dr. Nefertiti Walker. Dr. Scott Brooks, associate professor of sociology and the associate director of research for the Global Sports Institute at Arizona State University. He’s the author of the book Black Men Can’t Shoot. We also are joined today by Dr. Nefertiti Walker, who’s associate professor of sports management and the interim vice chancellor for diversity, equity and inclusion, and chief diversity officer at UMass Amherst.

You know, basketball season is upon us, somehow, because it's December, somehow. I'm not sure about either of those things, but it's happening. Me and Lindsay broke down a women's basketball preview just a few weeks ago, but I want to follow that up with a conversation with these two scholars to break down some data of a new report, a new field study coming out of the Global Sports Institute at Arizona State, where Scott works. And I also wanted to call up Nef and get her insights on breaking down and disaggregating some of this data. And so that's what we're here to do. We're here to really talk numbers and the stories behind those numbers. And so, welcome to Burn it All Down, both of y’all. Happy you're here. 

Nef: Yeah, happy to be here.

Scott: Thanks for having us.

Amira: Scott, I want to start with you. Arizona State of course does these great field studies, and the most recent one has looked at women's college basketball and coaches. Can you just tell us a little bit about this particular field study, what it looked at, and some of the things you found?

Scott: Yeah. So, you know, again, pleasure. Thank you for having me here with you all. Really what we wanted to do, we knew we were coming into Title IX. So, what do you do with that? Well, I'm a basketball person. As the head of research, I decided, well, let’s go ahead and take a look. We've heard…And you can go back to whether it's Zimbalist's work, Unpaid Professionals, where he laid out when you look at Title IX and its impact, the greatest beneficiaries when you're looking at leadership or coaching have been white men. And so knowing that from the time when Zimbalist came out with his book in the 90s, I said, you know, let's go and take another look. Now let's see where we are since the 90s. How are we stacking up?

I wanted to make sure that we showed people. I wanted there to be greater awareness that this is how it works. Because when I look at it, I say to folks, if you really want to understand how powerful white supremacy is, think about the fact that there is a statute designed to create more opportunities for women, and who gains the most are white men. I was like, this is the perfect example of how this works. And it's not that we had to create a program for white men to be included. It doesn't matter. This is where you get back to. So, what we did was we knew that 1972, even though that's the official start date, that's not the date in which we started to see some changes, right? So, women were coaching women, just as men coach men. That was the way that it was before Title IX.

So we said, well, when do things change? We know you had the AIAW, right? So we looked at when did women's basketball become a part of the NCAA. You're looking at ’82, 1981-82 season. We looked at landmarks like the 1984 star-studded women's basketball team, USA women's basketball team. So that's what we did. We started in 1984, went to 2019 and we looked at incoming coaches and outgoing coaches. And then who gained the most jobs? Well, by numbers, you're going to get white women gain the most jobs. When you look at by percentages though, you get white men gain the most jobs by percentages. We wanted to add a comparison, because if you look at HBCUs where you would expect that, one, they're going to have Blacks coaching Blacks, we wanted to see if that's how it worked out.

And how much would that account for, if someone were to do a study of all Division I, we didn't want that to be a padding, right? Where you can look and think that the numbers are greater than they actually are. And so very quickly, this continues to be a Black and white issue, that we have one Latinx coach hired from ’84 to 2019 in the Power Five and HBCUs, right? And they weren't hired at HBCUs, so we're really talking about the Power Five. You don't have any Asians, no American Indians, right? It is a very Black and white issue. And the increases show what we already knew, but they give us more detail, you know, that here white men have really gained.

The kind of particulars around this…So, generally when we think about requirements, how do you qualify for a job? You would look at past experience. So for us, the proxies are, did they have playing experience? At which level? What was their highest level? When you look at those numbers, Black women are going to stand out. More Black women are playing college basketball or college sport. And we have Black women who were playing, by percentage, they're playing at the highest level, more so than any other group. We looked at educational attainment. What are their degrees? Because maybe…We know that coaching isn't really dependent upon degrees, but we just said, let's take this into consideration.

So when you do that, you'll see that while whites will have more master's degrees, if you're looking at a PhD or an EDD or a law degree, you're going to have Black coaches. And it's not many, but you have Black coaches that have a law degree or a doctorate. No white coaches have law degrees or doctorates. And then we started to look at, well, what were their job backgrounds before they'd got to that head coaching job? Were they assistant coaches? At which level? You know, maybe they were high school coaches. Did they come straight from a playing career.

And as we have seen across our field studies in other sports, whites can come from a variety of backgrounds. So you're not scripted to having been a collegiate athlete, a high performing collegiate athlete, a professional athlete. Nope. If you're white, you might come in from a business background, right? Doesn't mean you weren't doing coaching somewhere, but they're going to come from a wider range, so that if people want to consider, well, what's the trajectory for whites? It's more random, right? They could come from a lot of different places. And then we started to look at what's their win-loss record, what's their age, what's their next job? We talk about second chances, and what we know from the literature is when you're a person of color, when you're a white woman, you're second chances aren't the same as they would be for white men.

And so particularly for coaches of color, did you get a second job immediately following your leaving that first job, at the same exact level? So is it at a Division I level? Is it a head coaching level? Or do you get promoted? Can you maybe go to a professional job? In other sports, we see that Blacks don't get that second chance. Here, Blacks still don't get as many second chances, but you do see the rare coach that moves into the Women's NBA. That coach, we had a couple who were like superstars, right? They're hall of fame basketball players. They get a different kind of trajectory. But you still get that whites have these greater second chances. So, that's the takeaways of our study. 

Amira: Yeah, absolutely. And to just underscore some of what you said with some numbers, when we're looking at these playing experiences, we're talking about Black women's playing DI basketball, upwards of 90 something percent. Whereas white male coaches are, you know, 20%. So we're talking about huge disparities here. I think the biggest disparity that really kind of makes a lot of this jump out is that when you're talking, especially about Power Five schools, Black women athletes make up well over 50% of the players, and yet white men and white women absolutely are taking up a disproportionate number of spaces from Black women. But then when you look at Black women's college ball at HBCUs, Black men and Black women draw about even – which is also disproportionate for Black women on that side.

And so I think that you see what happens here to Black women who really have been the heartbeat of this sport. You know, with that kind of in mind, I want to toss it to you, Nef, to tell us, you know…You told me that treatment discrimination is one of the things that we can point to here. Can you expand upon what that is and what happens to Black women who are making their way up these coaching trees, and where do they get stuck?

Nef: Yeah, no, that's a fantastic…And thank you, Scott, for providing that context too, because as you were talking about things like the opportunities that white folks have to fail in basketball, you know, I'm working on a few projects with David Berri out of Southern Utah. And we found similar things in the WNBA, right? Where both Black men and white men and women have opportunities to fail and get second jobs at a rate that's significantly higher than it is for Black women. And we don't have to look very far at fantastic coaches like Pokey Chatman, for instance, right? Who should be killing the game right now, but has other opportunities and is doing fantastic, right? But I just look at those folks who are so talented, who haven't had the second chance and the opportunities that others have. But some of the work that I've been looking at with some of the folks that I'm doing research with, both here at UMass and otherwise, we're taking a deep dive into the things that you brought up, Scott.

We're interviewing and talking to these Black women coaches. We're trying to talk to upwards of a hundred of them in DI women's basketball. We’re very early in the data collection, but we have some preliminary findings related to treatment discrimination in particular. And what these women are saying is that the discrimination that they're facing happens very early on. It happens as soon as they enter the industry. So, as they just finished playing ball, probably overseas, for instance, in the WNBA, they come into the college ranks, they get an assistant coaching position, and they're immediately placed into these roles where they have no access to decision-making. They're immediately asked to spend time developing players emotionally, socially, in ways that, again, doesn't really give them access to the decision-making, developing their talent and their ability to make game time decisions around plays and things like that.

So, that treatment discrimination begins immediately, but even once they move up the ranks and become for instance an assistant coach or a first assistant, they still even if they're the first assistant or the associate head coach sometimes, they're still forced to do things that aren't related to the strategy of the game, that aren't related to managing and working with donors, for instance, and some of the more executive-type tasks that are associated with being a head coach or an associate head coach.

You know, they're still out doing recruiting on the road, missing games in the regular season. They're missing games out on the road to recruit, even though they've been coaching now, you know, at a very high level for 20 years and played professionally overseas and played in the W. They're still being relegated to these tasks that should really be associated with a second or third assistant or a graduate assistant. You shouldn't have an experienced coach out on the road recruiting on a game day and showing up just in time for the game. I mean, that sends a signal to your student athletes. It sends a signal to the players, how much you value that person, right?

And then when you get there, the coaches are saying, you know, they've been recruiting, they finally get to the game a few hours before the game begins, and then their head coaches who – and this particular case that I'm thinking of is a white woman – is telling them this person is having some issues around, you know, social, emotional aspects of the game. “Can you go spend some time with them?” Right? So they don't even know the game strategy or plan, or how it's changed. So they can't even be a part of the decision-making that's going to happen during the game, because they've missed this big chunk of time where the other coaches, these coaches often being mostly white, are thinking strategy and talking through the strategy, both with their captains and their leaders on the team, but also amongst each other.

So, that’s just one example. Certainly in how these coaches are managed by their athletic directors is something else that's coming out of the data. Athletic directors are getting into the decision-making of what the players are wearing as far as color schemes, in ways that they absolutely wouldn't do for either their male counterparts or, you know, the football coach, for instance. Can you imagine an athletic director telling a head football coach at a big Power Five institution what colors they're going to wear? So that level of micromanaging is different. It's not how their men's basketball or football, for instance, the other sports that often bring in the same level of commercialization and revenue in general, they're not being treated that way. But these women, these Black women in particular, are being treated that way.

So, those are just some of the ways that treatment discrimination is showing up. Certainly, Scott, you brought up some issues around access discrimination.  And the women that we've spoken to, they see that playing out, and just the opportunities, right? Being given opportunities to be on the player personnel side of the game but not on the strategy, donor, executive decision-making part of the game. 

Amira: Yeah, absolutely. I think you bring up so many really, really good points to kind of chew on. The whole time you were talking, I was thinking about Sytia Messer, who literally had a coaching position at this kind of lower tiered schools, in HBCU as well, and then jumped to be an assistant coach in the Power Five as a way to get into that pipeline, and then spent like a decade just as an assistant head coach and then associate head coach under programs like Baylor, winning championships. Now at LSU under Mulkey, still. 10 years in the game. And in that time, Arkansas, which Sytia Messer as a player made a destination, made a basketball school, has hired two head coaches in this time, and both have been white men.

And I think that people get too lost in like, well, are those white men qualified? In the way that you drop qualifications, absolutely, you know? But at least one of them jumped into college ranks after coaching at the high school level, which I think Scott, in your field study, you identified a few instances of white men's coaching backgrounds being high school. And then you think about the pedigrees that Black women coaches have to bring in to surpass all this, just to get to a place where they're pigeonholed into, you know, being these recruiters and social, emotional kind of caretakers.

And I think that what you bring up, Nef, too, around donors, around strategic thinking around these ideas where you can really see how the perception around Black women as caretakers, Black women as managers, Black women as like asexual, like, mammies, like mothers, who can go into living rooms and recruit, but can't be strategizers, can't come up with a defensive plan. Can’t, you know, go woo the donors, can do that. But when you see anomalies in this, you really are looking at the Southeastern conference. And to me though, it's not this warm and fuzzy tale, because actually everything I see around the SEC is about precarity still. I think about Dawn Staley being the blueprint, quite literally, right? Being the one who, obviously coaching at Temple, she didn't really even want to get into coaching.

She had, of course this amazing playing career. And then that was the gamble. That was the gamble by the University of South Carolina, bringing her down. And they had patience. Carolyn Peck once said, “They had patience with you.” They made this investment and they let you stumble. They didn't put you on thin ice. And then when she started winning and she started showing she could work with the donors, all of this stuff, other schools in the conference were like, hey, we could do that. It's quite literally a blueprint. And so of course we know at the start of this year – so, January, February, March of 2021 – there were seven Black women head coaches in the SEC. That's half the conference. I think it's really easy to still applaud them, they have five now. But that's three losses, and then coach Harris was hired.

And so we're talking about a precarious, precarious position, where we already know the data on second chances. We know how thin that ice is. You know, all of the Black women coaches to talk to say, “We have to win.” I think, Scott, your data showed that white women coaches got double the amount, twice as many second chances as Black women. And so to have all of this in mind, and then we look at the SEC, almost all of them played in the SEC. They all came up coaching in the SEC. There’s something about all of them are also Southern. Almost all of them, like 98% of them, even Dawn Staley, who's like certainly very Philadelphia, everybody knows she's Philly. But like most Black Philadelphians, her people are from South Carolina.

But the problem with them all being in the same conference is that they have to beat each other. And so it's already kind of set up in a way where only about half of them are going to be able to succeed in the current setup, because they're concentrated all in the same conference. When you look at the landscape of women's college basketball today, thinking about these access and treatment discriminations, what is on your radar about either a possibility of a breakthrough in this, or more warnings about where we’re going? Scott.

Scott: Yeah, no, that's a great question. I think I'm reminded of the fact that we typically say that the end zone keeps moving, right? That the goal keeps moving. To your point about how they're going to have to compete with each other, and therefore one success is another's failure, and it'll be that constant comparison – and it's going to be a close comparison. “Why aren't you doing as well as Dawn,” right? Like, it's going to be one of the comparisons. It's such a tough thing to try to think about what we're doing right when you see all of the continuing factors that tell you…Carolyn Peck won, and yet it took so many years later for Dawn Staley to get to this opportunity. So, I don't have belief that, oh, things have changed, because now we've seen these starts and stops before, right? We all study this. We know how integration, segregation, all this stuff works. There's starts and stops. It's not a linear thing where once we solved it, we fixed it, right?

When we got into the pandemic and of course the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, I remember folks saying, well, what's the answer? And I would say, if we knew that, we wouldn't be here. So, we don't have an answer to that. What I think we got are…And now the next study we're working on is looking at connecting our athletic director study. We're now adding presidents. We want to look at the idea, people have hypothesized this and we see it in certain industries, if you increase the diversity at the top, will it trickle down? Trickle down is a wonderful American idea, right? [laughs] This idea that things will always trickle down. I don't believe that, because the structures, again, are still the same.

So, when you get white coaches were no longer able to coach their athletes the same, where they could have done this social, emotional work – that means that the criteria should have changed, right? What they're asking Black coaches to do is to do the job they can't do. They're also asking their athletes to do the job they can't do, because they'll lean on a leader and say, hey, go talk to that person. See, we don't recognize these shifts, right? This system doesn’t recognize it, and therefore say, so we've got a problem here, right? Now, athletics administration did this kind of the shift, need to think of this as more of a business. So what do we do? We bring in NBAs. You still ended up with the same kind of cycle of not having folks of color, but business is supposed to make that shift. Until I see those kinds of shifts and requirements, changes in the idea of what the job is, I think we're still stuck.

I love what Nef said in terms of this treatment discrimination and access discrimination. I actually look at how it starts when they're an athlete. So, across the board, these ideas of whether or not we're fit to be a coach, they're already embedded. We don't even have to get to where it started. Like, there isn't a place where it didn't start. When they bring in their athletes I have wondered, how can you say that there is a pipeline issue, when over 50% of your athletes are Black women? There can't be there's a pipeline issue. Even when they say, “Well, they’re not motivated.” Well, why aren't they motivated? Why would they be is really the better question. [laughs]

So, I'm looking at that and saying we have to see a change in how they see our athletes. That's what's a great thing, is we're kind of forcing that change. The athletes are saying “I'm more than an athlete.” Depending on who you’re starting with, you know Natasha Cloud, Maya Moore, like, hey, I'm more than an athlete. Until the white establishment thinks about our athletes differently, we will never be fit to be coaches, and that's crazy and terrible, but that's the issue, right? 50% athletes, 30 something percent of assistant head coaches, and then you get down into these small numbers as head coaches. You can just see how there's a stop gap, and it all starts with that idea of who Blacks are and what they’re capable of.

Amira: You know, when I think about this trickle down thing that you appropriately are like, absolutely not, you know, it also doesn't work if the people standing ahead of you have big ass pans out and are catching all the trickle down, right?

Scott: [laughs] That’s true.

Amira: It's not benign, like the water's getting caught on a ledge. It’s active hoarding of resources. 

Scott: That's right. That’s right.

Amira: And I think that the point that you ended at is exactly what I really want to get your thoughts on too, Nef, is like, what is the impact of this? And you started to talk about some of it. Well, you know, I hear all the time, I say all the time, the Black women coaches say all the time, like, you can't be what you can't see. And so if you're coming up in the game, you're already receiving messages about where your role is in this industry, in this game, what the ceiling looks like for you. And I think that part of this for me is just, again, another way that we think of exploitation of Black athletic labor – and disposability of that, because the disposability comes in saying if you're no longer performing for me, if you’re no longer doing for me symbolically or, you know, physically on the court or on the field, you have run your course, and we might be able to use you as a symbol and market you as a legend. I mean, going back to Messer, Arkansas has a whole tribute page for her about how she's one of the finest in the game. And I'm like, make it make sense to me! [Scott laughs] You know what I mean?

What's getting lost, part of this kind of stop gap that you speak to, is that next space where it actually comes to decision-making, resource allocation, right? And the ability to say actually here's a new blueprint for even how we think about things like coaching. When you said, hey, they're doing the role that white coaches have abjugated, that's exactly right. And I think about that too when we talk about this coaching trees and we talk about athletic administration, because one of the threats to the system and disruptions that Black women coaches offer is the ability to do that, right? Dawn Staley offers that disruptive ability because she can do it all and stick it to donors and especially what we've seen over the last two years is not disaggregating real world shit from what's happening on the court.

And we've seen that with Black women coaches being leaders off the court. I’m thinking about Mississippi coaches going to the State house and talking against the flag. I'm thinking about the work that's being done by the blueprint or by, you know, other student groups who are empowered by their coaching staff to get out there in the streets and to make a difference. And that is creating a fissure, a blueprint, where it's usually the role of the coaches to tamper that, to say just shut up and dribble, to pull that back – and what is a threat to the system and to athletic directors everywhere, when the coaching staff is like, nah, I'm going to lead you into the trenches.

And that is the expansive ability that we see of Black women coaches bringing to the table, where it's not bifurcated into these like, recruitment, social, emotional, strategic thinking, but modeling what happens when you can do it all, you know? You can do it together. And, despite being in competition with each other, you also have a sisterhood, a camaraderie. And I think that that collectivity and that disruption is certainly a threat. And so when I think about why it matters, I think about why it matters to continue to keep the status quo is to trample down these disruptors. But I also think of course just what it matters to the athletes coming up in the system. Nef?

Nef: Yeah, man. You said a word, you said a lot there. But you know, the trickle down diversity, you know, that comment stuck with me because you often hear that. You get a few key folks of color, women in these positions of power, and now people are going to see role models and now they know they can do it too. And that would be a fantastic story if it was true. But we live in this world of racism and sexism that's been ingrained in absolutely every part of society. And I think of all of this stuff through this organizational lens, because it's just my disposition in the research that I do. You know, college athletics is racist and sexist, ableist, amongst many other things as well. But if we're just talking about racism and sexism, having people in these positions doesn't erase the racism and sexism, and it doesn't erase the racism and sexism that they have to deal with every single day in their job.

So the idea of, you know, having the role models, hiring a few people, having Black coaches in these positions…You know, Amira, you mentioned a breakthrough or warning. I think the warning is that we can't ignore the fact that these are still racist and sexist institutions. And we have to be very intentional in understanding that and acknowledging it in a way that allows us to do work, develop strategies to mitigate it. Like, we're constantly having to mitigate the racism and sexism in the institutions, baked into every single part of the process – as well as the racism and sexism that's baked into individuals and their ideals about how Black women should be behaving.

That warning I think that I have is tied to the breakthrough as well, which is seeing someone like Adia Barnes perform the way that she performed last year in the Final Four. I mean, her defensive strategy was out of this world, right? In ways that we hadn't seen from a lot of coaches in the last couple of tournaments. And that was why they did what they did, was of course they had the talent of the players and their team and superstars, et cetera, et cetera. But they also had a coach with a defensive strategy that absolutely shut down a lot of offensive games in ways that we hadn’t seen. And people were talking about that in ways that they hadn't before about a Black coach, about a Black woman coach. Again, often it's oh, “She's a player's coach. She can recruit so well. Her players love her…” blah, blah, blah. And that's fantastic, because you need that to be a great leader, but you also need to acknowledge game and recognize game, right? And Adia has game when it comes to strategy and coaching. I felt like that was a breakthrough.

I think another breakthrough, looking at someone like Dawn Staley, who is who she is, right? She comes into the game authentically, like, she's wearing her outfits, she's wearing her Prada or whatever name brand. She's eating her candy on the sideline. Like, she is authentically Black. She's an authentic Black woman. And I think by her behaving that way and allowing her players to behave that way and not feel forced to assimilate, they're shifting the culture.

I mean, we've seen this culture shift in the WNBA and we've seen it shift in the NBA. And of course the shift in the NBA happened long before the shift in the WNBA, and we're now seeing, I think, the repercussions of that culture shift, is that we have more Black men in these leadership roles. I think you have to have a culture shift because you have to create a space that allows these people to be who they are. And I feel like folks like Dawn Staley and other Black women who are showing up authentically Black and not trying to assimilate into the culture of college athletics are creating and shifting a culture that will allow other Black women to come into this space and be cared for and be able to be themselves and not have to deal with the constant code-switching that's just exhausting.

I mean, again, the work that we're doing, this is the feedback that women have given us, is that eventually the code-switching, the having to assimilate, the feeling of being stuck in this sort of treatment discrimination hell – they're just like, I don't want to do it anymore, right? Or they just give in and say, okay, I'm going to be a forever assistant coach or a forever associate head coach and never think about how I can make it to those ranks – or they leave, right? They leave. And all of these women are, you know, they feel confident in the future of women's basketball because of folks like Dawn Staley and Adia Barnes in particular. 

Amira: Yeah, go head, Scott.

Scott: I love the direction that Nef took it. Like, if we think about where are some of the bright spots or what could be signs of it, I'm going to take it personal for a second, right? So, being a professor now, what, 17 years, 16 years, and I've worked in corporate America, done some other things. You feel…And my work is on middle status players, those who are not the best, not the worst. And I talk about that condition. They are on a short leash. They feel like anything that they do, every action has such immense impact on their future. When we're talking about people of color, it's also a collective future. So, not only do you have your individual, what's going to happen to you, but we do also think about how we're connected to other people of color, obviously. So how does this impact the others? So then you can easily get into imposter syndrome as well, right?

So you can think of all the things that happened. Well, I work for a Black man. It still took me some getting used to. Oh wait, he's got my back. When I'm not in the room, I don't have to worry about shit being talked about me, because he's going to squash that. He's going to make sure the interpretation and the frame is right for what's going on. I remember working in corporate America, somebody…I was in the room with people who were managers, and they were talking about a woman employee, and they were saying how they thought she wasn't performing well. And then one person inserted – and it's still not a great thing, but it helped – when you realize she's pregnant, because what they were pointing out was, you know, she doesn't seem to have as much energy, I'm noticing this, I'm noticing that. And then the person said, oh, you realize that they're pregnant. Oh! And everything shifted.

And that made me think in that moment, see, this is what happens all the time with us, right? When the stigma of race is constant – as it is, in our system – this is what Black women coaches are dealing with. And so you get exceptionalism, right? So yeah, our hero Dawn is an exception, and she deserves all of that. The problem is you're competing with folks who are treated the same way, who are high school coaches are not high school coaches and so on when they're white.

And so I wondered and said, well, what if…And I remember posing this to someone. I said, if you really want to fix it, just give it to all people of color. It's like, let's just scrap athletic administration and just go all people of color, if you're really committed. And this white person looked at me and I said, well, hell, I mean, if we believe in this cronyism and so on, if you really want diversity, we should be able to bring in who we want. One of the questions that we have in this is the pressure that even when you get that position, the pressure that you feel to have a mixed or a diverse working staff because you know how fragile your situation is, how precarious it is. And so can you really do the job you want when you maybe you can't even depend on them to have your back in those back rooms? When you can't depend on them to continue to frame it?

And the scary and crazy part is, you can have a Black woman as a head coach, has to rely upon a diverse group of coaches, because that is protection. And those very people who are supporting them underneath them have the power to mess them up. Like, that's how crazy this thing is. So, what are our coaches' staffs look like for our Black women? Because if it's not conducive to success, if you feel like you're constantly under pressure, even if you do it well, you're suffering, right? Mental health. You’re suffering because you're under such strain. 

Amira: And it's not even that Dawn is just the exception, but like, it’s that the exceptions are necessary to make the system continue to work. [laughs] And we see this in athletics, we see this in politics, we see this in life in general, right? Us, you know, uppity Negroes who've been able to get our degrees are “proof” that education systems work, right? A Black president was “proof” that political system works. Dawn Staley and her new contract are “proof” that this works, that it's a meritocracy. And they become actually always at risk for being reappropriated, to being declawed, and really to being used as a balm to keep the current system in place.

Because now athletic directors can say, oh, this is not about the fact that you're a Black woman, but if you want a contract like Dawn, you need to do X, Y, and Z, right? Where's my championship? That now becomes the bar that they can point to, and they can say lower your expectations, because I don't have a ring from you, actually. And Dawn did this and Dawn has this because this is what she has. And I think that's the really delicate dance that people are doing, is that knowing every time you have success, it opens doors for that little person on the sideline who's like, oh, I could be that. But at the same time, it also reinforces power in different ways.

And I think about that a lot too when…I’m meditating on something that Nikki Fargas, who was a long-term LSU coach, now president of the Las Vegas Aces. And she made a really good point that has really been sticking to me, which is like, until there's other places for Black women coaches to go, this is why we have to force the conversation here. And what she meant by that was that white men coaching women's basketball will always be asked to go coach on the men's side. Every year, Geno is asked, like it's a step up, like, are you going to take over UConn men? Are you going to go coach on the men's side? Because that's a pathway that's open for them. We are seeing preliminary conversations, especially at the professional level, where disproportionately white women – but not all, like Kara Lawson is definitely in there – are getting opportunities at the professional level on men’s teams. But that is small and few and far between.

And so really if you're a Black woman in basketball and you want to coach, it's not like there are multiple avenues for you to decide where you can do that, right? It's here, it's in women's college ball. And that's because that's where Black women athletes are. And until you have actual opportunities to coach, until you have somebody coming up and saying I want to coach ball, and I want to do it on the men's side or on the women's side, or I want to start my own league, or I want to do it at the college ranks or the professional ranks – and have that legitimately be pathways – the one pathway they have to follow is you play, you excel as a player, you get into an assistant coaching rank, you work your way up there, and then you find your way back to the sideline, back to the court in this way. And that's it. That is the one avenue. And that avenue, as we just said, is jagged as it is.

And so I think it's really important to put this conversation we're having, this data, like you said, Scott, in conversation with the field studies y'all have done on athletic directors, because what I've found with Black women athletic directors, this is very similar story here, right? We found they get caught at the SWA level because of the same treatment discrimination Nefertiti is talking about. And so what you have here is actually a whole system that goes far beyond athletics and really tells a story about how Black women in America are treated. And if that context is what we can use to frame this discussion, then we can see how these are all kind of symptomatic of, as you said, the way that Black athletes, the way that Black women, the way that Black people are seen and understood and move through this world, right? Is finding these kind of constraints and closed doors everywhere we look.

So, that's not really hopeful. [Nef laughs] Which is fine, because we don't have to be helpful people. But here we are, here we are in this 2021-2022 basketball season. You have this new gender equity report that demonstrates without a doubt how disproportionate investment is on the men's side. Flamethrowers, a reminder: me and Lindsay and Jess broke down these atrocious numbers, if you really want to read all of the receipts about how schools are literally incentivized to build up those men's program at the expense of everything else, including of course the women's side. And so now you have all these promises about what this postseason will be. There's talks about combining these postseasons to see if that will add it. You have Paige this week become a Gatorade athlete, right? You see these big money contracts that really don't extend to Black women. You have the Sharapova effect happening with NIL, but yet we don't see Aliyah Boston on the come up in the same way.

And so in this current landscape of women’s college basketball, where we see a cluster of Black women coaches in the SEC; you have Adia Barnes, right? You have zero Black women coaches still in the Big 12 – still, still in the Big 12 there's zero coaches. Let me just say that again for y’all. You have a whole bunch of people clustered at the assistant level. You have a lot of Black women athletes doing their things, but not getting the same access to name, image, likeness rights, right? And you have a postseason tournament that is stumbling over itself to pretend to provide an equitable experience coming up.

What are y'all looking at? What are you particularly interested in? Is there anything you're chewing on that you want to put front and center that you said, this is something I'm watching? Either because you're like, this is, this is going to get worse and we need to keep our eye on it, or like, here's a kernel of something that maybe we could build upon?

Nef: Yeah, they’re on notice, right? I mean, they acted a fool last year with the gender inequities. And I think this year, especially for March Madness, they’re on notice. Everyone's going to be watching. All of the women athletes, they’re going to be having their phones out, texting the guys on the men's side, what do your facilities look like? What are you getting in your goodie bags? Like, they are absolutely on notice, I think. And for good reason. Certainly looking at the success and the opportunities and the postseason of March Madness for other Black women to step into head coaching roles is something that, you know, I'm always on the lookout for.

And I think generally speaking you know, the work that we're doing on this project, the research team that I'm working with, we’re trying to understand how the experiences that these coaches are telling us they're having, these Black women who are head coaches, how is it playing out for their teams, right? How is it playing out for them in the postseason and the contracts that they're getting, extensions they’re not getting, for instance. We want to see sort of the influence of their experiences, the culture that we know to be both racist and sexist in college athletics, and how that might be influencing their opportunities in the future.

And one last piece I think is sort of trying to understand and interrogate the racialization of the name, image and likeness contracts that are happening right now and will be happening through the end of the post season, because so far we do see that it is racialized and that the top Black women athletes are not getting contracts that are similar to their white women peers. So, those are some of the things that I think at least the folks that I'm talking to and the grad students and the colleagues that I'm researching with, these are the things that we are going to be looking out for. And, you know, putting these folks on notice that we're watching. And we'll be tweeting about it, right? So, you know, you might want to act right.

Scott: Yeah. You know, I think those are wonderful points. I'd like to add, really, I'd love for us to build greater coalitions. I would like to see athletes start to…And I was at University of Missouri for four years. I was there during the 2015 season for the football team. And one of the things that we started to talk about really before that, got to spend some time with different football players. And I said, if you don't like what's going on at this university, you should take this back to the community. You need to take it back. You need to share with your fellow athletes. You know, you get a lot of football players from Texas, and I said, you all have a huge network. What if you all put together the report card? Here's how you get treated at this school. I said, this is going to have an impact on recruiting. You all have more power than you realize, because this is the collegiate arms race, right?

So, if we could find ways to help and athletes to take on that, there's something in that. And I think similarly, we all knew that name, image, and likeness was going to come out this way in terms of race and in terms of gender. I would like for those corporations and organizations that step forward, particularly when they’re sports-based, for those folks to step into this space and say we need to correct this, because this idea that there’s this inequity and it's going to be fixed by name, image, likeness was of course false. If we're about what we say we are, then we're going to come on in. So if we come on in, we're going to use, Dove, whatever, and we're going to make sure that we are sponsoring women athletes of color. Like, let's correct this.

That to me is one of the things I would love to see. That right now, the name, image, and likeness has really been a way for the NCAA and universities to say, you know what? Okay, we're no longer exploiting, because there's name, image and likeness. And instead we see the same patterns. So, I think there's some coalition building. I would love…And I still think we've got space to do more of the work together, that us, in our spaces, researchers and scholars, having greater visibility of our work, being able to help work with the athletes who have, you know, they have greater aspirations for equity. They want to do it. They're in a space where they feel like they can.

And I think, you know, the ways to build forward are to take the knowledge we know – how white supremacy works, how it's going to be in everything we do – call those receipts. Call upon those receipts to get those corporations who said that they were about this to be about this, and let's also help our community be able to highlight, yes, we know this is an opportunity for us to do something more, whether that's go to school, hopefully get that degree, and to maybe have some other kind of professional career you wouldn't have. But we got to take care of our community, and our power is in our collective. So if we start to say this is how you're going to be treated, we can start to redirect and take our power in how collegiate sports operate, because labor is everything. We know that. Without our labor, they don't get to make these millions of dollars. 

Amira: Labor is everything. And I think that is like the two things that I'm really watching. One, on the NIL side, that it also requires a rethinking of sports marketing practices, a complete disruption of that. I have been saying, it can't just be we're selling Gatorade, we're selling shoes, we're selling beer, et cetera, right? Like, where's the lash company that is going to come sponsor the fact that these girls' eyelashes…Like, I will continuously say this, because their lashes never come off! [laughs] It's wild to me. And actually a week after I said that at GSM Live, Dana Evans from the Chicago Sky announced a deal with Opulent Lash, which is like the first time we've seen somebody do that.

That's at the professional level. But come on, I don't know how you could watch the Final Four last year, I don't know how you could watch the tournament last year and watch Dijonai’s eyelashes never come off as she's like driving and flawlessly hitting her free throws. And she had like glam lashes on! These are how you actually rethink these marketing boxes. You know, what are the possibilities here? But I think, going back to your point about labor is everything, what I would like to see is this conversation being had in conjunction with many others.

You know, I always think about C Vivian Stringer, who sued her school to integrate her cheerleading squad in Jersey. And she said, “I didn't want to be a cheerleader, but it put me closer to the court to yell at the guys,” right? What are coaching pipelines for people who didn’t play? Where are Black women coaches in basketball who didn't play, right? Where is the Bill Belichick, who just came up and loved the game and studied the game, but didn't have that playing experience? Athletic labor has been the thing that opens the doors. So what happens in absence of that? The other thing is, a lot of people find themselves after their playing careers in these pipelines because that is what is open. And I would love to see us continue to talk about labor in terms of like, what are the possibilities of post-playing days, that coaching are one of them, right? Scholarship is another, right? Media is another.

There's a range of opportunities here that are often not even placed in front of people. And that goes back to what happens when you’re an athlete. What majors can you even take? What are you guided away from? What extracurricular opportunities do you have or not have – and it’s mostly not have. We're also talking about a very formative period in people's lives to figure out what the hell they like to do and how they set their lives up, and being able to take very seriously those people who want to go into coaching and those who don’t. People who are not on the court who want to go into coaching, how do they get in? I think that those conversations must be included in this one in order to start seeing any kind of inroads to the issues and the struggles that we're talking about.

Well, y’all, it has been a pleasure to break down this and do a special kind of scholar edition of welcoming in the women's college basketball season. If you have any off the cuff predictions – bold predictions are always welcome. My bold prediction wasn't so bold, but I said Adia would be back in the Final Four, because people are doubting her. But if you have anything you're watching, any just like fun thing about basketball that you want to check for as we conclude here?

Scott: Well, I'll tell you, my quick one is…And you know I've got some Philly roots in me, so obviously Dawn's going to win, [Amira laughs] but I'm predicting we're going to have three sisters in the Final Four.

Amira: Ooh, write that down.

Nef: That that was absolutely my prediction, is that we'd have three. So, yep. I see it as well. I look forward to it. Wow, that would be something, right?

Amira: I'm going to push you further. What three? Dawn…

Nef: Adia.

Scott: Dawn, Adia…

Amira: Who's your third? I know Joni is mine. 

Scott: I think so, too.

Nef: I think they'll end the season top five, top four, and I think they'll split up the SEC, and I agree. 

Amira: Well, mark it down! 

Scott: The SEC is going to be tough.

Amira: SEC is always tough, let me tell you. I mean, I've said this before, my little cousin plays in the SEC, so I started watching a lot of SEC games. I was like, what is wrong with this conference?! Why do they go off like this? They’re so tough. Like, it's a pleasure to watch SEC ball. So, you know, Pac-12 is calling themselves the conference of champions. So, we'll see. I myself, as much as I can't stand that it's already December, I am very much looking forward to March somehow already. 

Nef: Same.

Amira: So, it's been a pleasure. Dr. Brooks, Dr. Walker, thank you for joining us here on Burn It All Down. Flamethrowers – burn on, not out, and we'll see you next time.