Survey: HS coaches share opinions on race in hiring

Duluth football coach Corey Jarvis didn’t think race would be an issue when he was one of the top coaching candidates on the market in Georgia during the offseason.

Jarvis had spent five seasons at M.L. King, a Class AAAAA school in DeKalb County. His record was 49-11. He had won a region title and sent more than 50 players into college football.

"I went on a couple of interviews outside the metro area,’’ Jarvis said. “One guy [on a hiring committee] asked if I didn’t get the head coaching job would I be a coordinator. He didn’t feel like the area was ready for a black head coach. That was kind of a slap in the face. I came in with just as good a resume and presentation than anybody else had. They wouldn’t ask anybody else that, would they?”

Black and white head coaches differ on whether racism is a factor in hiring, according to a survey of state high school football coaches conducted by Georgia High School Football Daily for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (147 of 405 coaches responded).

Seventy-seven percent of black head coaches said racism is a major concern that is not addressed enough in hiring and promoting. Only two of 122 white coaches surveyed believed racism was a major concern in hiring. Fifty-six percent believed racism is not a problem at all in hiring, and 49 percent said racism is a concern, but that black coaches generally get a fair shake.

Of the 405 football-playing schools in the Georgia High School Association, 92 had black head coaches in 2010.

The best predictor of the race of the football coach is the racial makeup of the school, especially in predominantly white schools.

"Typically African-American head coaches work in majority African-American schools,’’ said Jamie Aull, a black head coach at Mount Zion-Jonesboro. “Will Grayson ever have a black head football coach? Probably not. The same goes the other way. Will Mays ever have a white head coach? Probably not.’’

Those presumptions are more valid at majority-white schools. There are seven black head coaches among the 251 Georgia schools that have more white students than black students. There are 69 white head coaches in the 154 schools that have more blacks than whites.

Ahmand Tinker, athletics director at Carver-Columbus, said South Georgia is a significant area of concern for black coaches.

“The majority of North Georgia teams and communities are still majority white because they feel like they can better associate with a white head coach in regards to … relationships that lead to money for the program,’’ Tinker said. “On the other hand, if you look at most schools in South Georgia, they are majority black communities, but the old-money boosters, which are majority white, still run the communities and counties via jobs and land [and] therefore unofficially control the hiring practice of the head football coach in those communities via control of the school boards.’’

Rick Tomberlin, a white coach who has held head jobs at majority-black Valdosta and Washington County, said he understood the concerns of black coaches, but was confident that black coaches get a fair shot most of the time.

Now at Effingham County, Tomberlin said that he thought that Washington County, and even tradition-bound Valdosta, would consider black head coaches.

“I really think they would,’’ Tomberlin said. “There may have been places where it’s difficult for an African-American coach to break in, where maybe they’ve never had one, that type of thing. It’s something that’s not happened enough, but I think it will.’’

Tomberlin said he had found it difficult at times to find black assistants willing to move their families outside of larger cities to rural schools. He said many good black candidates lacked degrees in education, which public schools require.

Among those he tried to hire, he said, were former Washington County all-state players Robert Edwards and Demetro Stephens. Edwards is head coach of Arlington Christian, a private school in Fairburn.

The only black coach who responded to the survey who said racism was not a concern in hiring was Mike Carson, who replaced Jarvis at M.L. King.