Why aren’t there more minority coaches in the Shrine Bowl?

In 1966, North Carolinians Tommy Love and Titus Ivory became the first black players selected to the Shrine Bowl. They were included following a tense lawsuit and a court order that black players must be part of the annual high school football all-star game between North and South Carolina.

The North Carolina team won handily that year with Love starring at running back. South Carolina began to pick black players the following year.

Black coaches never got the same court-ordered support.

The Shrine Bowl is the oldest high school football all-star game in the country. It was founded in 1937 and, in the 81 years since then, there have been 359 coaching positions with the South Carolina Shrine Bowl squad. Nineteen of those 359 spots have gone to 17 black coaches (5.3 percent). Thirteen of the 19 positions filled by black coaches have come in the last 14 years.

North Carolina has had fewer. Former Lewisville and Lancaster coaching legend Bennie McMurray is the only black man to ever head the N.C. Shrine Bowl squad. North Carolina has had 14 black Shrine Bowl coaches.

“They do a great job, but as far as the head-coaching opportunities, you never see any minorities up there,” said former high school football coach Milton Butts, who coached for 34 years in the Fayetteville, N.C., area and has made it his campaign in retirement to raise awareness of the disparity.

“Just trying to win”

From 1937 to 1971, African-American coaches weren’t considered for the Shrine Bowl because of school segregation.

The first black coach involved with the Shrine Bowl squad was Mayo’s Virgil Wells, who was a South Carolina assistant in 1981.

Clover native Bill Tate (1992) and former Lewisville coach Bennie McMurray (1999) were among South Carolina’s first five black assistant Shrine Bowl coaches. Tate, from 1A Timmonsville, became South Carolina’s first minority Shrine Bowl head coach in 2004 and Reggie Kennedy (2007) and Tommy Brown (2013) joined him in that exclusive club in the years since.

North Carolina didn’t have a black coach until 2000, when Anson’s Fred Davis was selected as an assistant.

Tate didn’t think much about making history in 1992 or 2004.

“Every now and then someone would bring it up and I would talk about it,” he said, “but most of the time we were just in coaching situations, just trying to win for South Carolina.”

Butts and several other black coaches in North Carolina complained about the lack of Shrine Bowl opportunities for minorities in 2004. The following year, three black coaches were named to the Tarheel staff, led by McMurray, who became the state’s first black Shrine Bowl head coach just three years after moving to Charlotte’s E.E. Waddell from Lewisville.

“Should have been somebody that had been in the state longer,” McMurray said while eating a burger and french fries last week. “It was plenty coaches, African-American coaches, black coaches, that deserved that right to coach.”

McMurray has never lost an all-star game as a baseball or football coach. He won over 400 baseball games and five state titles at Buford and Lewisville, and added around 200 career coaching wins and three more state titles in football. He didn’t doubt his own qualifications, just the fact he was picked so soon after crossing the border.

But even if it felt weird for McMurray, it was an important step, according to Butts, who was on McMurray’s 2005 Shrine Bowl coaching staff.

“It’s not about black coaches being better than white coaches. We’re all good coaches, that’s not the point,” Butts said. “Diversity is important.”

“Not an easy process”

As long as the two states have different methods of picking Shrine Bowl coaching staffs, success rates also will differ when it comes to minority inclusion.

North Carolina’s system is simpler.

A 10-person committee combs a comprehensive list of high school football coaches in the state, looking for longevity, good character and success, though Shrine Bowl board chairman Ronnie Blount said win-loss record isn’t hugely important.

North Carolina also wants its Shrine Bowl head coaches to first have been assistant coaches in the game. Blount said the average wait between being a Shrine Bowl assistant and being the head coach is over 10 years.

South Carolina’s process is much more structured. Shell Dula, the head of the South Carolina Athletic Coaches Association and a very successful former football coach at Ninety-Six, Union and Greenwood, explains it this way: “There is a lot of sheets” of paper,” he said. “I do most of it by hand.”

When a coach is selected as an assistant for the North-South all-star game in Myrtle Beach, the path to becoming Shrine Bowl head coach commences. The coach would then have to serve as a Shrine Bowl assistant, and then as a North-South head coach before being considered to head South Carolina’s Shrine Bowl team. The wait times between those different stops on the path can sometimes top 10 years, a substantial amount of time when added together.

“For some it comes quicker than others, depending on the number of people in front of them,” Dula said. “Race does not enter into the picture.”

Geography and school classification are rarely involved, except to occasionally break ties among multiple coaches. Win-loss records are never considered.

Dula’s finalized list of coaches for a particular year’s Shrine Bowl then has to be approved by Jerome Singleton, who is African-American and head of the South Carolina High School League.

“It’s not an easy process,” said Dula, who won 253 games during a 32-year coaching career and was a Shrine Bowl head coach in 1999. “It doesn't happen overnight. But that’s one of the advantages of staying in coaching for an extended period of time: these all-star events come your way.”

Is it race or classification?

Dula posited that there just aren’t that many black high school football coaches in South Carolina.

South Carolina’s 2016 census data described the state’s population as 68.5 percent white, 27.5 percent African-American. Forty-eight of South Carolina’s 203 teams that play high school football have black coaches, about 24 percent. Thirty-three of those 48 black coaches are in the eastern half of the state (using a diagonal line from Aiken through Columbia, northeast up to the state line).

“I think our state is getting better with the number,” Dula said. “Certainly not equal by any means, but more minority head football coaches.”

Tate, who has coached almost uninterrupted at Timmonsville since 1973, said school classification is as much, if not more, of a barrier to Shrine Bowl participation.

He may be on to something.

▪ In South Carolina, 36 of the 48 current black head coaches are in the 1A, 2A or 3A ranks; only four coach in 5A football.

▪ Only four of South Carolina’s 42 Shrine Bowl head coaches since 1975 have come from the 1A classification. Tate was one of the four.

Coaches and players from the 1A classification are almost always underrepresented in the Shrine Bowl. That’s probably one reason South Carolina’s North-South all-star game has provisions to assure a certain numbers of 1A players are selected each year.

“It’s getting better and better but we still have a shortage of black coaches on the higher levels, 4A and 5A,” said Tate, who coaches in a predominately black region of the state. “I think when you hit 1A and 2A, especially in the Lower State, there are a lot of minority head coaches and assistant coaches. Then it kind of thins out.”

What percentage of each SCHSL classification’s head football coaches are minorities?

What can be done to close the gap?

Two things already happening will help close the Shrine Bowl’s minority coaches participation gap:

▪ The all-star game’s coaching staff was originally three men in the late 1930s, but now is seven. Five of those spots are filled by head coaches and two by assistant coaches.

▪ Schools continuing to hire black and minority coaches, especially in the 4A and 5A classifications. The Herald’s coverage area is one of the better areas in the state for this, with Chester’s Victor Floyd, Indian Land’s Horatio Blades, Lancaster’s Bobby Collins and Clover’s Brian Lane all minority head coaches working in the three biggest classifications.

North Carolina’s more flexible system may enable it to include more minority coaches in the Shrine Bowl more quickly. Blount said he’s going to permanently add Butts, McMurray and former college football official Gary Wiley to the state’s 10-person coaching selection committee, with the hope that they will help bring in more minority coaching candidates.

“I think that’s what’s gonna help provide some diversity along the way,” Blount said.

In the past, the committee was almost always white, unintentionally according to Blount. Before meeting with Butts, Blount didn’t realize that North Carolina’s Shrine Bowl teams had selected only one African-American head coach.

“We’ve never looked at who the minority coaches were, versus who they weren’t,” he said.

The rigidity of South Carolina’s system makes it less capable of implementing quick change.

Dula said his No. 1 requirement for picking a Shrine Bowl coach is a prior stint as a North-South head coach. That means the coach would have experience picking an all-star team from half the state before picking 44 players from the entire state. As long as SCACA maintains that requirement and continues to reward longevity over anything else, things will largely stay as they’ve been the past 15 years.

“We’ve got us some good, young minority head coaches,” Dula said. “But again, they have got to wait their turn.”

Blount said many capable Shrine Bowl coaching candidates in North Carolina retire and move to South Carolina schools, or take college assistant jobs. He cited former Durham Hillside coach Antonio King, who was a Shrine Bowl assistant in 2015, before leaving to take an assistant job at East Carolina University. King certainly would have been on a shortlist to be a future head coach in the all-star game had he remained in high school football.

Blount said North Carolina has discussed changing the criteria. It wasn’t uncommon for a coach in the 1980s to spend 30 years in teaching and coaching, but for a variety of reasons that doesn’t happen much anymore.

A diverse and rich experience

None of the black coaches who spoke to The Herald wanted minorities included simply because of their race. They all said they opposed any Shrine Bowl coaching candidates list with asterisks next to black coaches’ names.

“We want to get him because he’s a great coach and if he’s a minority that’s great,” Blount said. But we’re putting the steps in place for him to have a voice at that table.”

It seems unlikely the Shrine Bowl coaching selection committees sought to exclude minority coaches -- at least in the last 30-40 years. But by not considering race, there does appear to be under-representation.

“Seventy to 75 percent of the kids playing in the Shrine Bowl are black,” Milton Butts said. “The person that speaks at the banquet, to the team, never looks like them.”

Butts said there also could be a trickle-up effect if more minority coaches are involved in the lower levels of organized football, specifically high school. More minority players would see more coaches “who look like them,” as Butts put it, remember positive experiences and get involved in coaching as adults. If they stick with it long enough, maybe they’ll get to coach in a Shrine Bowl.

McMurray remembers Virgil Wells, who after making the Shrine Bowl coaching staff as an assistant in 1981, never was picked as a head coach for the game. And Walter English, who after being picked as an assistant in 1988, tragically died the morning of the game due to a prolonged illness. McMurray cherishes the memories and lifelong relationships he created while coaching the Shrine Bowl, an event that has raised millions of dollars to support the Shriners Hospital.

“I just wish there was some way some of these other guys could experience that feeling,” he said.

This story was originally published October 19, 2017 at 1:24 PM with the headline "Why aren’t there more minority coaches in the Shrine Bowl?."