A delicate balance
My boy Texas is one of my best friends, and I lobbied strongly for him to get the prep sports editor position at the Athens Banner-Herald last year. He's done an excellent job at the paper, and I'm proud of him.
I do, however, think his latest column on the racial makeups of area teams will be unfortunately misinterpreted by folks. This will happen because he deviated too much from his central point and failed to articulate his argument.
To be clear, what he means to say is the work done by former Clarke Central head coach Billy Henderson throughout his career (and, more specifically, the 1985 state championship season) in building a harmonious environment for his racially diverse team is laudable. It's an excellent primary argument - that the bonds built through athletics transcend racial and socio-economic boundaries and are should be what our society strives for.
The problem is he focused too much on the recent struggles of Oconee County (an almost all-white school) and Clarke Central (a predominantly African-American school), and then appears to blame their struggles on the lack of racial diversity.
See, to win football state championships in Georgia, teams must have a certain racial balance. It doesn't have to be half and half like Henderson's teams of the past; 70-30 will do just fine. But whites need blacks, and blacks need whites. "Remember the Titans" ring a bell?
Clarke Central had that winning recipe until the mid-1990s. Then, "white flight" and the lure of a better education cropped up in Oconee County.
Clarke Central football hasn't been the same since.
Oconee County football hasn't been immune, either. The mostly white Warriors won the Class AAA state title in 1999, but had the services of standout black players such as Tyson Browning, Jerry Willoughby, Willie Johnson and Tony Taylor. They also had star white players like J.T. Cape and Clayton Matthews. But even former Warriors coach Jeff Herron - who is now aiming for his second state title at Camden County - admitted this week that Oconee County's only state football title would not have materialized without the likes of Willoughby, Browning, Taylor and Johnson.
Shoot, without them, the Warriors never make it past the second round that season.
I think this is a wrongheaded argument to make, partly because it gives a false impression that he buys into the ignorant argument that 'whites are the leaders on the team, while the blacks are the athletes' (for the record, that is not how he feels ... which is why this is such a odd thing to read, and why ultimately I think he didn't express himself clearly). But it also is a fairly false statement.
Parkview was an overwhelmingly white team which captured three straight Class AAAAA titles, while Clinch County was a predominantly black team which has enjoyed considerable success in Class A.
And, finally, it implies the reason the Gladiators have struggled since the mid-1990s is because it has more black athletes and fewer white ones, which is false. The reasons why Clarke Central have struggled in the past decade are legion, but off the top of my head I would argue that poor coaching during the Steve Brooks era, the rise of stronger programs in Region 8-AAAA and, quite simply, football players who were not as talented as the Dunta Robinsons and Damien Garys of the world have considerably more to do with Clarke Central's struggles than any decrease in white athletes.
Likewise, Oconee County fell apart in 2002 and 2003 because of the graduation of the most talented senior class in that school's history and the Warriors move up to compete in the state's most difficult region (Region 8-AAAAA). Upon returning to Region 8-AAA in 2004, Oconee County promptly won the region title and this year are one game out of first place.
I think Texas meant well and, again, I see and agree with the point he was trying to make. But I think he got sidetracked along the way and didn't develop his argument enough, and sadly that's going to color the almost inevitable debate this piece will trigger.
I do, however, think his latest column on the racial makeups of area teams will be unfortunately misinterpreted by folks. This will happen because he deviated too much from his central point and failed to articulate his argument.
To be clear, what he means to say is the work done by former Clarke Central head coach Billy Henderson throughout his career (and, more specifically, the 1985 state championship season) in building a harmonious environment for his racially diverse team is laudable. It's an excellent primary argument - that the bonds built through athletics transcend racial and socio-economic boundaries and are should be what our society strives for.
The problem is he focused too much on the recent struggles of Oconee County (an almost all-white school) and Clarke Central (a predominantly African-American school), and then appears to blame their struggles on the lack of racial diversity.
See, to win football state championships in Georgia, teams must have a certain racial balance. It doesn't have to be half and half like Henderson's teams of the past; 70-30 will do just fine. But whites need blacks, and blacks need whites. "Remember the Titans" ring a bell?
Clarke Central had that winning recipe until the mid-1990s. Then, "white flight" and the lure of a better education cropped up in Oconee County.
Clarke Central football hasn't been the same since.
Oconee County football hasn't been immune, either. The mostly white Warriors won the Class AAA state title in 1999, but had the services of standout black players such as Tyson Browning, Jerry Willoughby, Willie Johnson and Tony Taylor. They also had star white players like J.T. Cape and Clayton Matthews. But even former Warriors coach Jeff Herron - who is now aiming for his second state title at Camden County - admitted this week that Oconee County's only state football title would not have materialized without the likes of Willoughby, Browning, Taylor and Johnson.
Shoot, without them, the Warriors never make it past the second round that season.
I think this is a wrongheaded argument to make, partly because it gives a false impression that he buys into the ignorant argument that 'whites are the leaders on the team, while the blacks are the athletes' (for the record, that is not how he feels ... which is why this is such a odd thing to read, and why ultimately I think he didn't express himself clearly). But it also is a fairly false statement.
Parkview was an overwhelmingly white team which captured three straight Class AAAAA titles, while Clinch County was a predominantly black team which has enjoyed considerable success in Class A.
And, finally, it implies the reason the Gladiators have struggled since the mid-1990s is because it has more black athletes and fewer white ones, which is false. The reasons why Clarke Central have struggled in the past decade are legion, but off the top of my head I would argue that poor coaching during the Steve Brooks era, the rise of stronger programs in Region 8-AAAA and, quite simply, football players who were not as talented as the Dunta Robinsons and Damien Garys of the world have considerably more to do with Clarke Central's struggles than any decrease in white athletes.
Likewise, Oconee County fell apart in 2002 and 2003 because of the graduation of the most talented senior class in that school's history and the Warriors move up to compete in the state's most difficult region (Region 8-AAAAA). Upon returning to Region 8-AAA in 2004, Oconee County promptly won the region title and this year are one game out of first place.
I think Texas meant well and, again, I see and agree with the point he was trying to make. But I think he got sidetracked along the way and didn't develop his argument enough, and sadly that's going to color the almost inevitable debate this piece will trigger.
posted by Jmac at 10:09 AM
3 Comments:
Agreed. He's treading on some pretty dangerous ground here, and I certainly hope that it was just a clarity issue.
Indeed, many of the South Georgia teams that so frequently dominate state championships — particularly in smaller classes, but also in the higher classes that suburban Atlanta schools get way more credit for dominating than they should — are mostly black, if not entirely black, because the schools they represent are mostly black, if not entirely black. So many of these South Georgia counties have all-white private academies that compete in GISA, because people haven't quite gotten over that whole Brown vs. Board thing. So to say an all-black team can't succeed is indeed a misnomer.
I'm also not convinced that the racial balance of, say, the Cedar Shoals football team is any different from the one at Clarke Central; at the very least, we know that Cedar Shoals has a higher percentage of black students than does Clarke Central. And yet Cedar Shoals has clearly been the dominant team in the Athens area since the late 1990s, and has had a handful of teams that could have been state title contenders but for bad draws in the playoffs. (Speaking of largely white teams...Marist, anyone?)
Athens Academy has had little trouble competing in Class A, and while it's not the most lily-white private school around, it's certainly awfully pale.
To break it down to simple matters of black and white is far too simplistic. The problems that have afflicted the school are, in many ways, race-related — crippling poverty, white flight, etc — but they represent a far deeper ill. To say a team needs a balance of blacks and whites is too simplistic. What a team needs is a balance of kids who feel like they have a chance in life at all, something I think Clarke Central is probably a little short of.
If ever there was evidence that Clarke Central's problems go deeper than black and white, look at them now, four years into a coaching era that was supposed to bring the program back, an era that was supposed to bring a powerful black coach who would move all those black players who'd struggled under the oppressive yoke of white coaching.
They're 2-5, they can't beat Loganville, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of hope.
It's clearly more than black and white.
— Lovie
Unfortunately, this wasn't some of Texas' best work. Basic premise is just out of whack -- that you need a diverse team to win. You just don't. Its great, and its healthy, and its good for the kids, but you don't need it to win. Look at Stephenson (DeKalb), Southwest Dekalb, and the aforementioned schools. Brookwood and Parkview have more diversity now than they used to, so they aren't fair game really. It really is all about the coaching, and I think that is what he was getting at.
BB
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