Tennis: Coaches like Washington are still too rare

By Mark Tennis

Record Contributer

When the first Charles Washington Award was presented by The Record in 2006 to the area’s top high school senior student who embodies the best in athletics, academics and community service, what caught my attention was the statement that the late, great Edison coach was “the first black head football coach in Northern California.”

Only Brice Taylor of Los Angeles-Jefferson, who coached there as far back as the 1940s, pre-dates Washington, who coached the Vikings to six league titles from 1965-83 and mentored countless people while working in the Stockton Unified School District prior to his death in 2009 at age 76.

Sadly, the number of black high school head football coaches statewide, especially at prominent programs, has remained low.

Over the past two seasons, only one school among the 30 teams from Northern California ranked in the top 70 statewide, Carmichael-Jesuit, has an African-American head coach, Marlon Blanton. Other than Blanton, Monterey Trail’s T.J. Ewing, and Edison’s Andre Horace and Lincoln’s Brian Gray, who both resigned after last season, finding any elite programs in Northern California with a black head football coach is like looking for hits against Madison Bumgarner in the World Series.

Since 1976, no team coached by an African-American has won the Sac-Joaquin Section Division I title and the only title team I know for certain that was coached by an African-American was Fairfield-Vanden in 1984 by Ron Beverly in Division III.

And just three out of the 95 football coaches in state history who have reached 200 wins are black. Washington would have easily reached 200 wins had he coached for more than 17 seasons, and if there were playoffs in the California Interscholastic Federation northern sections prior to the late 1970s.

It’s safe to say most young men look up to their football coaches in every community, so if efforts could be made for more blacks, especially former athletes, to get into coaching, that could only help. One former NFL player who has done that has been Antonio Pierce, who took over at Southern California powerhouse Long Beach Poly after he retired from the New York Giants.

Washington would be proud of the 11 winners of the award that bears his name, including this year’s recipient Erron Duncan of Weston Ranch, but he probably wouldn’t be happy if he knew that being a black high school football coach in Northern California still is quite rare.

Without speculating any reasons behind the low numbers, it’s curious why they aren’t higher.

— Contact high school sports contributor and Cal-Hi Sports editor Mark Tennis at MarkJTennis@gmail.com