Coaches as Teachers?

In my travels around the country, a phenomenon that never fails to impress me is the athletic excellence maintained by some of the most challenged schools in some of the most difficult urban areas.  I immediately remember the varsity football team at East St. Louis Senior High School when Bob Shannon coached it to SIX Illinois state championships at the highest level of competition.  I need not describe the innumerable problems that beset East St. Louis, Illinois.

The following is a reaction to what I have observed over the years:

Athletic Coaches Are Successful Teachers
(Let’s Use Them in the Classroom)

I can remember when very, very few African Americans played football for predominantly white colleges because of their alleged limited mental talents, lack of discipline and volatile temperaments­-to cite but a few narrow-minded views.  These prejudices increased exponentially when the fitness of an African American to play quarterback was considered.  Not only did the above-mentioned bigotry apply to the evaluation of potential quarterbacks, but finding a black player capable of leading and commanding the respect of white teammates was unimaginable.  Mind you, this was the attitude of most NORTHERN colleges and universities.  The South was a world apart and advocating the inclusion of black players, at all, could provoke physical violence.
 
Back in 2006, some of us recall Vince Young’s stellar performance in the Rose Bowl in leading the University of Texas to the national championship over the University of Southern California.  Obviously, that demonstrated how “times have changed.”  Less than a week earlier Mark Price led the West Virginia Mountaineers to a Sugar Bowl victory over the Georgia Bulldogs led by D. J. Shockley.  Both quarterbacks were African Americans.  Almost a month earlier Reggie Bush of the University of Southern California won the prestigious Heisman Trophy, given annually to college football’s best player.  He, too, is an African American as have been approximately two-thirds of the winners since the first black player, Ernie Davis of Syracuse University, won it in 1961.
 
Not only have black athletes overcome formidable racial barriers during the past four decades, but the scope of their disproportionate excellence stretches from middle school through the National Football League and the National Basketball Association.  Something worthy of serious scrutiny is happening here.  What is the source(s) of this exceptional performance and concomitant motivation?  What is the methodology employed by the motivators (coaches?) that produces such phenomenal success?  We must remember that “natural athletes” are not born, that athletics are voluntary school activities and they are VERY demanding.
 
Whatever our attitudes toward athletics, we cannot deny that coaches somehow summon excellence from players who often live in some of the poorest and most chaotic neighborhoods.  I have often wondered about the feasibility of creating transitional programs to move some of these successful coaches into secondary school classrooms to teach courses beyond physical education.  They could then bring their great motivating power to academics and especially to the massive number of floundering black males.  If their “pedagogy” is too harsh for the classroom, then maybe it could be taken off school property altogether and underwritten by private funding.
 
At the prestigious private secondary schools, ALL athletic coaches teach academic courses.  Shouldn’t those of us who are concerned about the fate of young African Americans splice into the phenomenal motivating power of public school athletic coaches and steer their talents to a more expansive educational purpose?  I’ll bet that some active coaches or others wishing to leave athletics would jump at a fellowship to a transitional program at a graduate school of education.  Who knows?  Maybe the National Football League or the National Basketball Association might help to finance such programs.  It would be unfair to expect these coaches to relive the frustrations so poignantly described by Gerald Kimble, a former football coach at historically black Southern University in Louisiana: “We have done so much with so little, we are expected to do everything with nothing.”

David Evans

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Hillbillies Are Who We Are!

"You’re no hillbilly!" That’s a phrase I have heard many times mostly in the context of a snide, negative, derogatory slam. One day I even looked up the term in my trusty Encarta dictionary. That definition was so insulting, biased, and off the wall that I reached for my Roget’s Original Thesaurus (the old one that is almost impossible to find anymore). That definition was infinitely more acceptable but still not quite precise enough for me. In a graduate school creative writing seminar a few years ago, I was asked to state my cultural origins and how that affected my writing. My answer was simple, I AM BLACK APPALACHIAN!

Every member of the seminar wanted to challenge my personal assessment. They couldn’t hear the Appalachian dialect in my speech (that’s because the seminar participants didn’t really know what to listen for). There were no black people in Appalachia! I would love to have been an observer in a classroom at Kent State University when a certain professor of African-American studies made that particular pronouncement in front of my daughter. By the time she had to repeat her answer to a professor of ethnic studies at a major southern university, she could name ancestors back to the late 18th Century. Whether she recognized it or not, the fact was that Dori could immediately refute the often misstated fact that black people do not know the history of our families. We know more that we usually talk about…someone in our family or extended family knows.

Our family’s Appalachian heritage began in Virginia around the time of the Revolutionary War. My mother’s great-great grandfather settled in the Shenandoah Valley at the end of that war on land originally surveyed by George Washington. His life could not have been easy, he had to farm the land to support his family. His son, my mother’s great grandfather also farmed the land. There is no record (in the Virginia historical archives) that I have been able to find that says he ever owned a slave (or married for that fact) but there is a record that he filed papers insuring the freedom (from slavery) of his only son, my greatgrandfather.

According my grandfather, the family lived and worked together for many years until shortly after the end of the Civil War. The old man called his son in and said simply , "I’m getting older and soon I will die. I don’t want to send you away but it is time for you to take your family and leave here. This is your home but the rest of my family will never let you keep it when I’m gone." The son was apparently given a wagon, mules, farm tools, and a sum of money to buy land across the mountains. My great grandfather, his wife and five of their six children left Virginia. My best guess is that they followed what became known as the Midland Trail across West Virginia. My brother’s research said that the family spent a year working somewhere along the St. Mary’s River in West Virginia before they travel on to where our family lived on the Kentucky-West Virginia border. The family homeplace where my mother and her siblings were all born was actually the second piece of property the family owned in West Virginia.

Again, the family farmed the homeplace. William Henry, my great grandfather, built his home at the head of the holler (yes, I said holler, not hollow) where the family lived. He also built a schoolhouse and gathered his (black) neighbors together to hire a teacher. He was determined that his family would have an education (maybe because he had to sneak across the mountain to a Quaker lady who taught him to read the Bible!) That schoolhouse had as its first teacher, my grandmother, Mary, and as the last teacher my mother, Elsie. Each succeeding generation inherited fortitude, willingness to work hard, educational direction and a desire for a better life from the elders. We also inherited a strong sense of family. Today we are scattered across the country and involved in all kinds of professions and endeavors. Some are business people, doctors, lawyers, artists, musicians, teachers, construction/building trades workers, military, government workers, scientists…etc.

Oh yes, all of us are of Appalachian heritage. If that makes us hillbillies…so be it! We are who we are.

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