1/12/2020

She is the Smart One


Without deliberate malice intent, we still today cryogenically freeze young athletes, of all races, into worn out obsolete racial paradigms of limitations. "Racial stereotypes" is a nice politically correct term that when broken down becomes a squalid and dirty indictment of all racist preconceptions: that blacks are not cerebral enough to take on “leadership roles.” as players, coaches or in positions of management. 

Athletics remain today in America a great social benchmark for measuring racial trends. Listen between the lines of any athletic based conversation and immediately one can seize on the obvious catch words of racial athletic stereotyping. For example, if a basketball player is described as” very athletic,” or if a team has “great athleticism,” rest assured, it is a team of predominantly African-Americans. If a player or team is labeled as “smart” or “disciplined,” the labels are assigned dutifully to white players or a white team.

Today, if a quarterback is listed as a "dual-threat, run or pass," the chance this athlete is African-American is very high. If a quarterback is judged as a "pocket passer of limited mobility," then you have a safe bet he is white and in the eyes of coaches cannot outrun a dead black man.

In 2014, I agreed to take on a one-year assignment to coach the girls’ basketball team at St Louis Metro High School. I had coached boys for 30+ years but had always wanted to coach girls and had always wanted to coach in the St. Louis Public High League. I could mark off two items on my professional “to-do” list with one stroke, so I took the job.

Metro High is an anomaly for the St. Louis Public Schools, a high academic performing building. Metro is consistently ranked in the top ten list of the nation’s public high schools, once rising to number 1 on the prestigious US News and World Report’s list of the nation’s top public high schools.

All Metro students are required to perform 300 hours of community service prior to graduation. For the 2003–2004 school year, Metro was named a Missouri Gold Star school and a national Blue-Ribbon school. It was again named a Missouri Gold Star school and Blue-Ribbon school in 2007–2008. In 2012, Newsweek ranked the school as 12 out of the top 1,000 public high schools in the United States. In 2016, the school earned the top scores for Missouri’s public high schools for end-of-course exams in english, science, and social studies.  In May 2018, Metro again earned the top ranking in the state. You get the point: Metro kids are smart.


The academic demands and pressure to perform in the classroom placed upon its students are off the chart. Half of the entering freshmen will not be around in four years for graduation, academic casualties, transferred to a less challenging city high school. It is the one magnet school in the SLPS that has done what it is supposed to do - draw non-black students from the county. The high academics at Metro and the college opportunities it provides its graduates is a very effective “magnet” to entice students and their parents to come back to the city schools. Metro is the pride of the city’s educational leaders, a fair-haired favorite child within the midst of a field of red headed stepchildren.

My basketball team was all black. We were pretty good. We had early in the season beaten East St. Louis, IL, a powerhouse with ten times our enrollment. Metro had never beaten East Side in any athletic event, so around school, it was a big deal. But it got us no respect from the establishment powerhouses in the suburbs. The Public High League was viewed as a circuit void of talent (the private schools and the county public schools had siphoned it all off), undisciplined and poorly coached teams of underachieving black kids. We were entered in the 16-team field for the Visitation Academy Christmas Tournament, the only black city school entered. The “Viz” tournament is the oldest and most prestigious event of its kind in the Midwest.

Despite our 5-1 record, we knew we would get little respect from the suburban schools at the seed meeting. I had told our girls we wanted to be seeded 15th and draw the second seed in the opening round. We did not want to be 16th and forced to play the number 1 seed, Incarnate Word Academy, who would finish the season as the number 2 ranked team in the nation. We could not beat them, but I felt we could best any of the other 14 teams in the field. I sandbagged as best I could at the Saturday morning coaches’ seed meeting. Bingo, we were seeded 15th and drew the number two seed, a large county school ranked third in the state.

Our first-round opponent’s coach made the statement in the local media that it was an honor to be chosen second in such a strong field, but she and her team knew they would be in for “a strong test AFTER the first round.” AFTER? Oh, my! The ambush was set, the perfect overconfident foil in place. We won by 9 points and it really was not that close.

I had two young ladies at Metro in 2014 who were very athletic; excellent quickness and jumping ability. The rest of the roster - nice girls, very hard workers and very smart- but slow and flat footed. We learned to play to our strengths: work ethic and intelligence.

After the game, I was interviewed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and their reporter’s first comments were, “this has to be one of the biggest upsets in history of the area’s girls’ basketball.” Not really, I thought, but I let him go on uninterrupted. He then said, “your team is so athletic.” I looked at him like he had two heads. “Did you watch the game,” I asked? “We are not athletic, what you mean is we are very black.” We are also, I told him, “very smart.” So much for stereotypes.

It became a running joke amongst our team that white teams were smart and black teams were athletic. We played late in the season, Lutheran North, a north side team that played one white girl.  The rest of their rotation was black. Late in the game we were nursing a lead and wanted to make sure we took away the three-point shot by putting a lot of pressure on their best shooter, who just happened to be their only white player. I told my girls as we broke the timeout huddle, “be sure and know where Klotzer is.” One of our girls asked, “which one is Klotzer?” Before I could answer, one of our senior players, without missing a beat said, “the smart one.”

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