By Welch Suggs

By now, everyone has heard the clamor for more diversity among the leaders of college sports. Every year, surveys come out showing that all but a handful of athletics directors are white men, particularly at sports powerhouses. The same goes for coaches of men's and women's sports; these days only a minority of women's teams have female head coaches.

What few have discussed is the problem behind the problem: Few women or nonwhite men get on the career track for the top jobs in athletics administration and coaching.

"A lot of people have not focused on that part of challenge, and that has been the challenge," says Eugene D. Smith, an African-American who will become athletics director at Ohio State University's main campus this month.

If an athlete decides to go into sports management, or a coach makes the jump from the sidelines to the front office, typical entry-level positions are in marketing, fund raising, business affairs, rules compliance, academic advising, or life-skills counseling.

The first three teach the glad-handing, money-raising, negotiating, and administrative skills required of modern-day athletics directors. The second three are peripheral jobs; people may become assistant or associate athletics directors in charge of academics or compliance, but making the jump to the executive skybox is very difficult.

As surveys by the National Collegiate Athletic Association show, white men get most jobs in the first three areas. Women, African-Americans, and members of other minority groups are hired mainly for the second three. The same is true in coaching: Minority coaches tend to get peripheral jobs that do not groom them for leadership positions, and women are shut out of most jobs with men's programs and are losing ground in women's.

Experts say the reason is the old boys' network, to which white male candidates, even young ones, have much more access than others. College presidents and athletics directors, they say, have not done enough to widen their personal networks.

The phenomenon, known as tracking, can look exploitative when it results, as it often does, in a team of mostly black players led by coaches and bosses who are mostly white. Recognizing that, the NCAA took out a two-page advertisement in The New York Times on the first weekend of the Division I men's basketball tournament to say that "the NCAA membership needs to be more representative of the student body, from coaches and athletic directors on down."

According to The NCAA Record, of the 12 athletics directors hired since the first of the year, 10 are white men. The 11th is Alison Cone of California State Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo, and the 12th is Mr. Smith. Although three black men were hired late last year as athletics directors, they were the first in several years.

Of the eight people hired as compliance coordinators or assistant athletics directors for compliance, three are white men, four are women, and one is a black man.

The Crucial Mentors

In 2003-4, 89 percent of Division I athletics directors were white men, according to an NCAA report, even though white males made up only about 30 percent of Division I athletes. More than 20 percent of athletes were black, but only 9.3 percent of athletics directors, 10 percent of head football coaches, and 16 percent of women's head basketball coaches were African-American.

As for women, more than 40 percent of Division I athletes were female, but only 7.9 percent of athletics directors were. There were no women coaching football or men's basketball, and they had fewer than half of the jobs coaching women's teams -- even in woman-only sports like softball.

Only 8 percent of all athletics administrators in 2003-4 were black, according to the NCAA, but more than 20 percent of academic advisers, 13 percent of compliance officers, and 19 percent of life-skills coordinators were. And only 4 percent of fund raisers and business managers were black.

According to Mr. Smith and others, the scarcity has two causes:

• Historically, as athletics departments have come under pressure to diversify, they have hired women and members of minority groups in token roles, reserving decision-making jobs for white males.
• Universities have hired minority and female candidates for jobs in areas like academic advising on the belief that they could relate better to athletes of the same color or gender.

"I think there's an idea of, 'by having them in academic advising, we can keep these African-American athletes eligible,'" says Richard Lapchick, chairman of the DeVos Sports Business Management Program at the University of Central Florida.

Mr. Smith got his start as many athletics directors do: as a young coach who moved quickly into administration. After four years at his alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, he left sports to work in marketing at IBM. In 1983 Paul Sholts, the athletics director at Eastern Michigan University and a former coach of Mr. Smith's, hired him as assistant athletics director.

"He was looking for someone with a business background and loyalty to him, and he was looking for a minority, and he was forthright about that," says Mr. Smith. "He hired me and taught me the business, and he retired shortly thereafter, having groomed me as AD. I did not have the challenges that any young administrator would have."

After Mr. Sholts retired, Eastern Michigan promoted Mr. Smith to the top job at the tender age of 29. That set him apart from most prospective athletics directors, not just black ones.

After eight years at Eastern Michigan, Mr. Smith was hired away by Iowa State University, and then, in 2000, he became athletics director at Arizona State University. Now he faces his biggest challenge: running the country's biggest and most expensive athletics program, which is still reeling from crises in football and men's basketball in the past two years.

His success comes back to the mentoring he got from Mr. Sholts, he says. The other black men directing Division I-A athletics departments -- Kevin Anderson at the U.S. Military Academy, McKinley Boston at New Mexico State University, Damon F. Evans at the University of Georgia, Herman Frazier at the University of Hawaii, Michael Garrett at the University of Southern California, Daryl Gross at Syracuse University, and Craig K. Littlepage at the University of Virginia -- can say the same thing, Mr. Smith says.

The NCAA agrees. "Our collegiate culture has not been high on professional development, but extremely supportive of networking and learning at the foot of the mentor/teacher of the day," says Ronald J. Stratten, the association's vice president for education services, in an e-mail message. "Most women and minorities don't have the opportunities to be the No. 1 administrator or coaching assistant (and benefiting from close mentorship) without giving up and deeming the process to be racist and futile."

Coaches on the Sidelines

O. Fitzgerald Hill, who stepped down last November as head football coach at San Jose State University, found the same trend in football coaching. While doing research for his 1998 Ed.D. dissertation at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Mr. Hill determined that the majority of black men in the profession were hired to coach wide receivers, tailbacks, or defensive linemen. Or black coaches were hired as recruiters on the theory that they could relate better to black prospects. Necessary jobs, but peripheral ones.

Black men have been somewhat more successful in men's basketball and track, the other two sports with a high proportion of African-American athletes. In 2003-4, 28 percent of Division I men's basketball coaches (including nearly all of those at historically black colleges) were black, as were 21 percent of outdoor-track coaches. That year 58 percent of the men on basketball teams and 28 percent of those on track teams were black.

A Better Trend

The story is a little rosier for women in athletics administration. Thirty percent of assistant and associate athletics directors in 2003-4 were female, according to the NCAA, and examples abound of women who have made the jump from coaching into upper administration.

However, only five women are athletics directors at Division I-A institutions, that is, those with big-time football programs: Sandy Barbour at the University of California at Berkeley, Kathy Beauregard at Western Michigan University, Cary Groth at the University of Nevada at Reno, Judy McLeod at the University of Tulsa, and Deborah K. Yow at the University of Maryland at College Park. (Joan C. Cronan and Beverly A. Lewis preside over separate women's athletics departments at the Universities of Tennessee and Arkansas, respectively.)

Until the 1990s, getting ahead in sports was tremendously difficult for women. In the 1970s and 1980s, many athletics departments merged women's sports programs with men's, naming women's athletics directors "senior woman administrators" reporting to male athletics directors.

Because women got few chances to govern the revenue sports of football and men's basketball, they had little opportunity to learn the skills and make the contacts required of big-time athletics directors. That's changed, says M. Dianne Murphy, athletics director at Columbia University, which is in Division I-AA.

"I left Iowa in 1995 to go to Cornell, and I went there specifically to have football directly reporting to me," says Ms. Murphy, who left the University of Denver's athetics-director job in December to take the same position at Columbia. "I don't think it's important that you've played football, so long as you understand and appreciate it, its culture, what it means to a university and particularly its donors."

Judith M. Sweet, the NCAA's senior vice president for championships and education services, said that women have made some inroads in Divisions II and III, but very few in Division I.

Another troubling trend is the falling number of women coaching women's sports, Ms. Murphy says. Since the NCAA took over women's sports in 1981, the number of female coaches has plummeted. Now, fewer than half of head coaches of women's teams are women. That is partly because male coaches have been able to compete for jobs coaching women and partly because fewer women, relative to the number of teams, have gone into coaching in the past two decades.

The reason it's troubling, she says, is that "it goes back to women having role models" during their student years. Finding female coaches can be difficult because women have many more career options than they did in the 1970s, and have more difficulty than men balancing careers and personal lives in a way that enables them to pick up and move for jobs, she said.

It also depends on who is doing the hiring, says Ms. Murphy, who is currently searching for a head women's basketball coach. "Only 8 percent of directors of athletzics at Division I institutions are women," she says.

A 'Rooney Rule'?

The NCAA's national office in Indianapolis has always received high marks in the Racial and Gender Report Card, an annual report produced by Mr. Lapchick at the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at Central Florida. In the advertisement in the Times, the association said it would hire a new vice president for diversity and inclusion next month.

Mr. Lapchick said that the association ought to consider adopting a version of the National Football League's "Rooney Rule." The rule, which requires fines for teams that do not interview any African-American candidates for a head coach opening, was first proposed by the Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney.

"I think that it's really going to be the only way we'll shake up these positions," said Mr. Lapchick. "There would be tremendous resistance to it at first, but then we would find people we wouldn't find otherwise. Us publishing the Racial and Gender Report Card, the NCAA publishing its statistics, and Myles Brand [the NCAA president] saying nice things is great, but there's nothing like meeting people on an equal plane and realizing they have equal skills and could do great things for you."

Athletics administrators are dubious about such a rule and say that presidents and athletics administrators simply need to expand their applicant pools. Every athletics director maintains a list of candidates on his or her computer, or even in a back pocket, should a coach leave suddenly. Mr. Smith, of Ohio State, and Ms. Murphy, of Columbia, say that those lists need to be lengthened.

In her search for a coach, "I'm on the phone right now calling AD's, conference commissioners, basketball coaches, and associations, soliticing names and trying to develop a pool," Ms. Murphy says. "We do the typical thing of advertising in various and sundry publications, but how you find people is to get on the phone and contact your network."

Mr. Smith says he gets a lot of those networking calls, and at Arizona State, he had his human-resources staff maintain a list of promising black athletics administrators, which he would share with colleagues.

"I tell them to do their due diligence because I may not know these people personally," he said. "I may know Kevin Clark in the business office at Indiana, but I don't know him well."

He thinks the trends are changing, based on the faces he sees at the annual conventions of marketing and fund-raising personnel in sports. So does Mr. Lapchick. Three of the MBA students at Central Florida who want to get into athletics administration are African-American, and all plan to get into fund raising.

"But it's hard to tell," Mr. Lapchick says. "The numbers are so small, how can you say there's a trend?"