Black women and the Big Ten: 'A lot of room for growth' for coaching opportunities

On Feb. 5, at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., the Scarlet Knights women's basketball team will play Wisconsin.

It will be the first time since 2019 that a Big Ten women's game will have Black women coaching both teams.

Coquese Washington is Rutgers' first-year coach, having replaced the legendary C. Vivian Stringer. Marisa Moseley is entering her second season coaching the Badgers.

"I think it will be exciting when that happens,'' Washington said last week at Target Center during Big Ten media days. "But, absolutely, I think there's still a lot of room for growth when you look at the numbers, in terms of diversity, in terms of people of color leading programs. Especially in the Power Five conferences.''

In Division I women's basketball, 40.7% of the players were Black, compared to just 18.5% of the coaches, in the latest Tide's Gender and Equity Report Card, from the 2020-21 season.

This was a topic of discussion at last spring's women's Final Four, which was also held at Target Center, where South Carolina coach Dawn Staley won her second national title in five years with a victory over Connecticut.

Staley is the first Black coach, male or female, to win two NCAA basketball titles. She and Carolyn Peck (Purdue, 1999) are the only two Black women who have coached national champions.

In 2015, Peck decided to give Staley a piece of the net cut down after the 1999 title game. In an act of paying it forward, Staley sent pieces of her 2017 net to every Black women's head college coach before the start of last season.

Who will be the third?

In the 2021 SEC title game, after a 41-year wait, Staley's South Carolina team beat Georgia, coached by Joni Taylor, in the first Power Five women's basketball conference tournament championship in which both teams were led by Black coaches. It was a watershed moment.

"You can't dream what you can't see,'' Taylor, who is now coaching at Texas A&M, told reporters after that game. So [the SEC title game] was a chance for people to dream something that they haven't seen before.''

That was repeated last year when Kyra Elzy's Kentucky team upset South Carolina in the SEC championship game.

That is a far more likely occurrence in the SEC, where five teams are led by Black women. Among the 65 teams in the Power Five conferences (Big Ten, ACC, Pac-12, Big 12 and SEC), there will be 14 Black head coaches this season. There are three in the Pac-12, four in the ACC, two in the Big Ten and none in the Big 12.

On the men's side, Michigan's hire of Juwan Howard in 2019 broke a streak of three straight seasons when the Big Ten had zero Black men's basketball head coaches. Now it has four after the Gophers' Ben Johnson, Penn State's Micah Shrewsberry and Indiana's Mike Woodson were hired last year. The last time the Big Ten had four Black men's head coaches previously was 1996-97, which included Clem Haskins at the U.

"I think our league has taken a great step in the direction with just diversity, inclusion across the board," Johnson said. "I think now it's our job in the positions that we are to be successful and do things the right way."

When Wisconsin hired Edwina Qualls to be the women's coach before the 1976-77 season, she became the first woman of color to coach in the conference. In the 46 seasons since, there has been at least one Black women's coach in the conference in 40 seasons. The high-water mark came in the 2011-12 season, when Bobbie Kelsey was at Wisconsin, Felisha Leggette-Jack was at Indiana, Jolette Law was at Illinois and Washington was at Penn State.

There would have been two women of color coaching Big Ten teams last year if not for Stringer's leave of absence.

"I feel an incredible responsibility as a Black female here representing not only Wisconsin but in the Big Ten Conference,'' said Moseley, who was an assistant at Minnesota under Pam Borton from 2007 to '09. "Coquese, I'm excited — she's a friend — to go against her.

"For both of us, whether we're competing against each other or against other opponents on any given night, we have the opportunity to show what we're capable of doing, that we are coaches who just happen to be Black. I think for young girls, Black, white, any other race or ethnicity, they need to see us in these positions of power and understand we can run a program, be successful, we can do it with grace and poise.''

To Washington, it's all about opportunity.

"There is still a lot of work to be done,'' she said. "It's up to our administrations to cast a broad and wide net when they have hiring opportunities to ensure our head coaching ranks are reflective of what our players look like.''

Staff writer Marcus Fuller contributed to this report.