WASHINGTON
During his 20 years as a college athletics administrator, Lee McElroy has spent enough time at receptions to anticipate what strangers will ask him when they see the words “American University” on his nametag.
“The first thing they say is, ‘Oh, are you a coach?’ People can visualize a person of color as a coach,” he says.
“When I tell them I’m the athletics director, then it’s: ‘Oh, you hire coaches? Oh, you do the marketing? Oh, you raise money?’”
The answers to those questions are Yes, Yes, and Yes. Mr. McElroy, a black athletics director, does pretty much the same things as a white athletics director. What is remarkable is not the nature of his position, but that he holds it.
Of the 29 black athletics directors in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, 20 work at historically black colleges. Exclude those institutions, and the proportion of black athletics directors drops to 3.1 per cent -- nine of 288.
Black athletes, on the other hand, have a large presence in Division I, particularly in the two most lucrative sports -- football (52 per cent) and men’s basketball (61 per cent.)
“The numbers reflect America’s opinion of African Americans as leaders and as managers,” says Mr. McElroy, of the contrast between the figures for athletes and athletics directors. “If you are a person of color in college athletics administration, the environment is not always going to reach out and greet you in a real positive way.”
Cedric W. Dempsey, president of the N.C.A.A., says institutions’ general failure to hire black athletics directors is “hard to defend.” The association established a Minority Opportunities and Interests Committee in 1991 in part to educate members about recruiting black candidates for managerial positions. While the number of black coaches and athletics administrators has increased steadily since that time, the number of athletics directors at Division I institutions has hovered between five and nine.
“I think people in college sports are embarrassed that the record is so poor,” says Benjamin Ladner, president of American University, who hired Mr. McElroy as athletics director in 1996. “Big-time college athletics at the administrative level has a history of being remarkably closed.”
More aggravating, Mr. McElroy says, is that many institutions seem unwilling to hire a black athletics director unless that person has succeeded spectacularly in another field first.
Of the nine black athletics directors at Division I institutions, two -- Irv Cross, at Idaho State, and Mike Garrett, at the University of Southern California -- were star players in the National Football League, and three -- Tom Goss, at the University of Michigan; Merritt J. Norvell, Jr., at Michigan State University; and Eugene D. Smith, at Iowa State University -- were prominent businessmen.
White athletics directors are typically less well-known than those men, and most earned their jobs by working their way up through the bureaucracy of college sports.
“I think the road is much steeper for an individual who comes up through the traditional ranks,” Mr. Norvell says. “It is almost as though you have to have a mentor take you with them from job to job, or promote you to an associate athletics director’s job, where you can begin to attain some significant visibility.”
Mr. McElroy’s mentor was Mr. Dempsey, for whom he worked as an assistant athletics director for student services at the University of Houston in the 1970s.
Mr. McElroy, who attended the University of California at Los Angeles on a football scholarship, believes that his years as a linebacker gave him a special insight into the lives of athletes. “I think my strength was understanding the struggle between wanting to do well on the field, and at the same time knowing there had to be a balance,” he says. “A lot of people either are not concerned with the education of student-athletes, or they are opposed to it because they don’t think athletes should be a part of academe.”
At Houston, Mr. McElroy’s diplomatic abilities became evident immediately, says Richard E. Lapchick, executive director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University, who speaks frequently at seminars on racial diversity.
“He was somebody who was very strong in his ability to reach all sides,” Mr. Lapchick says. “He advocated the position of black administrators and black student-athletes, but he didn’t do it in a way that placed him outside the mainstream of college athletics. He was known as a man of passion and a voice of reason.”
Mr. McElroy says he set out to build a network of contacts within college athletics, and to accept as much responsibility as possible. In 1984 he was promoted to associate director of athletics at Houston, and in 1986 he was elected president of the National Association of Academic Advisors for Athletics.
As his duties grew, he says, so did the suspicions of some of his colleagues in the business. “People would ask themselves, ‘Why is he interested? What does he think he’s doing? There are very few blacks sitting in A.D.'s’ chairs. Does he think he has a possibility of attaining that level?’”
As it was, overcoming the biases of a few colleagues was not quite as challenging as learning to move in the heady company that athletics director must keep.
“In this business you do a lot of fund raising, and that requires a lot of friend-raising,” Mr. McElroy says. “You golf. You get involved with charities. You sit on a board. You have to do the kind of things that affluent Americans are doing.
“Being able to operate successfully and confidently in an affluent environment is critical. And if you aren’t reared in the environment, you have to grow into it.”
Mr. McElroy, the oldest of 12 children and a graduate of the segregated schools of Beaumont, Tex., was not reared in affluence. But by the late 1980s, he had had enough experience with all facets of college athletics to be a serious candidate for a director’s job.
The University of the District of Columbia hired him to head its athletics department in 1988, but he left that financially troubled institution a year later to become athletics director at California State University at Sacramento. There he oversaw the transition of the athletics department from the N.C.A.A.'s Division II to the financially riskier environment of Division I.
“He really understood the academic environment,” says Douglass B. Fullerton, commissioner of the Big Sky Conference, which Sacramento State joined during Mr. McElroy’s tenure. “As an athletics director, you are a classic middle manager at an institution of higher education. You have to be able to manage the people you work for as well as the people who work for you.”
Mr. McElroy spent almost eight years at Sacramento State, and during those years the N.C.A.A. became increasingly uncomfortable with the paucity of black coaches and administrators in college sports. Suddenly, says Orby Moss, Jr., athletics director at Georgia State University, black candidates were being interviewed for jobs at institutions that had never recruited them before.
In many cases, he says, an interview was all that a black candidate received.
“Five years ago a lot of jobs came open, and it seemed that one of us was always among the finalists,” he says, referring to himself and the other black athletics directors. “It got to be a joke among us. ‘Okay, which one of us is going to interview for that job?’ I stopped accepting invitations to apply, because I didn’t want to round out the equity profile for some search committee.
“It seems that for a black candidate to get a job, everything has to be just right,” adds Mr. Moss, who sees similarities between his hiring at Georgia State and Mr. McElroy’s at American. “Georgia State is an urban university. Atlanta has a large black population. The student body was one-third African American. Plus, Georgia State has never accomplished a whole lot, so that they didn’t have much to lose.
“At American, you have the same things: an urban university; Washington, D.C.; a racially diverse student body; and they haven’t done that much in sports.”
There are signs that the climate for black athletics directors is beginning to improve. Of the nine black athletics directors in Division I, Mr. Garrett, of U.S.C.; Mr. Goss, of Michigan; and Mr. Norvell, of Michigan State, lead large and prestigious programs. And all three of those men have been hired within the past five years.
In his two years at American, Mr. McElroy has received several inquiries about his availability from larger institutions. “I’ve told them my agenda here is not finished,” he says.
That agenda, stated briefly, is to increase the university’s athletics visibility without compromising its academic reputation.
“We will never be able to maintain the across-the-board quantitative commitment they have at a Michigan or a Wisconsin,” says Mr. Ladner, American’s president. “But I think we can win our conferences on a regular basis in certain sports.”
In the 1997-98 academic year, the Eagles’ women’s volleyball team won a berth in the N.C.A.A. tournament, and the men’s soccer team was ranked sixth in the nation.
Such accomplishments can be fleeting, however, Mr. McElroy says, unless programs are put on a sound financial footing. That is why he is excited about the doubling of attendance at men’s basketball games last season, and about the quadrupling of athletics donations in the past two years.
In raising money for his program, Mr. McElroy feels that he is also dispelling one of the last misconceptions about black athletics directors.
“The No. 1 reason people will mention for why there aren’t black A.D.'s at white institutions is that it would hurt the fund raising, the public image, the marketability of the program,” he says. The best way to fight that perception, he argues, is to “have a track record for having raised money.”
“People understand money,” he says. “And they understand how much money is needed in intercollegiate athletics.”
BLACK ATHLETICS DIRECTORS AT DIVISION I INSTITUTIONS
Irvin A. Cross, Idaho State U.
Michael Garrett, U. of Southern California
Tom A. Goss, U. of Michigan
Charles J. Jones, Jr., Central Connecticut State University
Lee A. McElroy, American U.
Orby Moss, Jr., Georgia State U.
Merritt J. Norvell, Jr., Michigan State U.
Eugene D. Smith, Iowa State U.
Nelson E. Townsend, State U. of New York at Buffalo
Note: This list excludes black athletic directors at historically black colleges.