Keith, Floyd A.

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Keith, Floyd A.

1948—

Organization executive, football coach

When Floyd Keith became executive director of the Black Coaches Association in 2001, it seemed to mark a new direction for an individual who had devoted the previous three decades of his life to coaching football. But Keith didn't see it that way. "I think I'm supposed to be doing this, as crazy as that sounds," he told Steve Jacoby of the Dayton Daily News. "I've been able to relate everything I've learned in coaching to this job. There is a final score, only now I'm not dealing with 18- to 22-year-olds. Now it's [people and administrators] 18 to 70." The "final score" to which Keith referred was the number of African Americans hired as head coaches of Division I (top-level) football teams in the National Collegiate Athletic Association—an area in which black coaches remained severely underrepresented.

Keith was born on August 22, 1948, in St. Marys, a small town in west central Ohio. He was one of just three African Americans in his high school class. "It wasn't Birmingham, Alabama, there was nothing close to that," Keith told Patrick Obley of the Columbia, South Carolina State, referring to terrorist incidents aimed at the black community in that city at the height of the civil rights movement. "But with the attitudes of the Sixties, you dealt with racism, whether it was overt or subtle." Keith had leadership ambitions while still young. "I forecasted for myself that I was either going to be a coach or a lawyer," he told Obley.

Moved from Star on Field to Coach

Keith was a star as a running back with St. Marys Memorial High School Roughriders, rushing for 183 yards in one game against archrival Sidney High School. At Ohio Northern University in nearby Ada, he became a two-year varsity starter in football, graduating in 1970 with an education degree. At that point, he was diverted from his career on the football field when he landed a job as offensive backfield coach at Ohio's Miami University, whose staff gained a reputation as an incubator of successful coaching careers. In 1974 Keith moved to the University of Colorado as offensive backfield coach and quarterback and receiver coach, remaining there until 1978.

The following year brought Keith his first head coaching position, at historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1983 he became running back coach at the University of Arizona, and then, steadily moving into larger programs, he became quarterback coach and passing game co-coordinator at Indiana University for nine years, ending in 1992. In that job Keith had a variety of responsibilities, including recruiting efforts in six states plus the District of Columbia. Three quarterbacks coached by Keith were later drafted by National Football League (NFL) squads.

With a variety of coaching experience under his belt, Keith was hired as head football coach at the University of Rhode Island for the 1993 season and became one of just a handful of black coaches active at the Division I level. Although Rhode Island was far from a powerhouse in the small Atlantic Ten conference, his work quickly began to show results. In 1994 the football squad ranked 12th nationally in passing offense, and the following year Keith led the Rams to a New England Division championship in the Atlantic Ten and a No. 22 ranking nationally among Division I-A schools. Keith and his wife, Nicole, a professor of kinesiology and statistics, started a family that grew to include four children: Kenyari, Imani, Mikia, and Kailan.

Keith's program at Rhode Island suffered a serious blow on October 7, 1996. That day three team members entered the Theta Delta Chi fraternity house and assaulted three of its residents during an ongoing dispute. Player suspensions, a game cancellation, and ongoing bad publicity plagued the program from then on. "That affected our recruiting," Keith told Mike Szostak of the Providence Journal (for an article reprinted by the Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service). "It affected support for the program." Parents steered football-playing sons away from Rhode Island, and facilities budgets suffered under the wary eyes of a troubled university administration. After struggling through four losing seasons, Keith resigned as head coach in November of 1999.

Took Charge of Black Coaches Association

At that point Keith had several options. He had sometimes fielded inquiries from teams in the National Football League, which had a stronger record of hiring minority coaches than did the NCAA. Instead he accepted the post of executive director of the Black Coaches Association on March 12, 2001. The BCA's mission is to foster the professional development of minority coaches in all sports, both in the United States and abroad. College football was among the organization's toughest challenges, with just four of 117 NCAA Division I schools having African-American head coaches as of 2002. Promotions flowed through a network of white coaches, making the game into what Keith, in conversation with Jacoby, called "the last bastion and stronghold of mental firewalls."

From an administrative standpoint, Keith's accomplishments with the BCA were impressive. He brought the organization's various branches together in a new headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana, and spearheaded a 500 percent increase in paid memberships. The group's annual fundraising topped $1 million for the first time in 2002. A new Achieving Coaching Excellence Program for women basketball coaches took shape under Keith's leadership, aimed at advancing minority women into the ranks of college basketball coaches.

On the national stage, however, Keith was best known for his unstinting activism on behalf of African-American college football coaches. A fixture on cable-television sports talk shows and documentaries, he patiently made the case for diversity, relying on the Title VII anti-discrimination clause of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He persisted despite receiving hate messages via e-mail and phone. Keith's most important innovation was the BCA Report Card, which each year assigned a letter grade—A, B, C, D, or F—to schools that had gone through the hiring process for a new football coach. Whether or not the institution ended up hiring an African-American candidate, it was evaluated according to a set of formal criteria that included contact with the BCA, diversity in search and hiring committees, diversity among the relevant candidates interview, time frame (a longer search process tended to attract more viable minority candidates), and adherence to the affirmative action policies of the institution involved.

At a Glance …

Born on August 22, 1948, in St. Marys, OH; married Nicole (university professor); children: Kenyari, Imani, Mikia, Kailan. Education: Ohio Northern University, Ada, OH, BS, education, 1970.

Career:

Miami University, Oxford, OH, offensive backfield coach, 1970-73; University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, offensive backfield coach/quarterback and receiver coach and passing game coordinator, 1974-78; Howard University, Washington, DC, head football coach, 1979-82; University of Arizona, Tempe, AZ, running back coach; Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, quarterback coach/passing game cocoordinator, 1984-92; University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, 1993-99; Black Coaches Association, Indianapolis, IN, executive director, 2001-.

Awards:

Sports Illustrated magazine, named one of 101 Most Influential Minorities in Sports, 2004.

Addresses:

Office—Black Coaches Association, 210 S Capitol Ave., #495, Indianapolis, IN 46225.

Keith gave out more than equal shares of Ds and Fs, and the Report Cards, disrupting the usual back-room dealing involved when college football coaches were hired, proved to be annual lightning rods for controversy. Particularly contentious was the rapid hiring of the white former NFL quarterback Steve Spurrier as head coach at the University of South Carolina in 2004, with no minority candidates interviewed (although an African-American member of the coaching staff was given the chance to apply and urged officials to hire Spurrier). Keith told Joseph Person of the Columbia State that university officials had shown "a complete disregard and lack of respect for our process," and he urged recruited players to boycott South Carolina's program.

Progress was slow, but the 2006 season success of black NFL coaches Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy, who led their respective teams to the 2007 Super Bowl, helped Keith's cause. "When I saw their faces…well, maybe you just have to be an African-American coach to have empathy for where they were coming from to reach this moment," Keith observed to Bill Benner of the Indianapolis Business Journal. "A lot of baggage has just been taken off the train." By early 2007 a pair of minority Division I-A hires had brought the total for that division to seven, a number equal to its all-time high. Keith told Thomas O'Toole of USA Today that he found encouragement in "what I'm hearing about the numbers of interviews in the current process. But it still gets to, at the end of the day, who's being hired."