Political Protesting, Race, and College
Athletics: Why Diversity Among
Coaches Matters
∗
James N. Druckman, Northwestern University
Adam J. Howat, Northwestern University
Jacob E. Rothschild, Northwestern University
Objective. Athletes have long used their platform to stage political protests on issues ranging from
racial oppression to athlete compensation. For college student athletes, protesting is complicated by
their amateur status and dependence on their schools. As a result, college coaches hold particular
power over student athletes’ decisions in this realm. We seek to better understand the determinants
of coaches’ attitudes toward student athlete protests. Methods. We use a novel survey to study
what college coaches think when student athletes participate in various forms of political protests.
Results. We find that African-American coaches exhibit greater support for protests and are more
likely to believe protests reflect concern about the issues, rather than attention-seeking behavior.
Conclusion. Our results isolate a major driver of opinions about athletic protests and reveal why the
relatively low number of minority college coaches matters: greater diversity in the coaching ranks
would lead to more varied opinions about the politicization of student athletes.
Political decisions fundamentally affect sports—this is clear on such issues as gender
equality in college athletics (e.g., Title IX), the use of public funds to build stadiums,
labor negotiations, drug testing, and more. Sports also affect politics, such as when athletes
use their public platform to make political statements. While there is a long history of
political protests by athletes (e.g., Bass, 2002; Kaufman and Wolff, 2010; Epstein and
Kisska-Schulze, 2016), they have become particularly salient in recent years: “the era of the
‘apolitical’ athlete appears to be drawing to a close as a ‘new era of athlete awareness and
advocacy’ has emerged” (Cooky, 2017:4).
At the college level, protests have included refusing to stand during the national anthem to
draw attention to racial oppression, threatening to boycott practice and games in response to
racially charged campus incidents, and writing the acronym “APU” (standing for “All Players
United”) on wrist tape to demand increased benefits for student athletes. These protests, not
surprisingly given the large college sports fan base, garner attention and generate debate.
They also accentuate the unique position of college student athletes, whose success as
athletes and often as students depends on their coaches (e.g., Staurowsky, 2014:23–24). As
Kassing and Anderson (2014:173) explain, “coaches hold a degree of authority over their
∗
Direct correspondence to James N. Druckman, Department of Political Science, Northwestern
data and coding for replication purposes are available at Druckman’s website http://faculty.wcas.north-
western.edu/˜jnd260/publications.html. We thank students in Druckman’s Sports, Politics, and Public Opin-
ion (Winter 2017) course for advice and assistance, Natalie Sands for research assistance, and Matthew Nelsen
for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Authors are listed in alphabetical order and contributed equally to
this article.
SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, Volume 100, Number 4, June 2019
C
2019 by the Southwestern Social Science Association
DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.12615
1010 Social Science Quarterly
respective players and by implication operate to some degree as supervisors . . . Athletes in
turn end up in subordinate roles.” What coaches think undoubtedly affects what players
are willing to do. Yet, we know little about what college coaches think when it comes
to various types of student athlete protests, and perhaps more importantly, what explains
variation in coaches’ opinions.
We aim to fill this gap with a large survey of National Collegiate Athletic Association
(NCAA) coaches. The survey probes their opinions on various types of student athlete
protests and the reasons behind those opinions. As we explain in the next section, we
expect race to play a large role in explaining variation in attitudes, with African Americans
being more supportive of protests. This is, in fact, what we find. Regardless of what one
believes when it comes to student athletes’ protesting, our findings make clear that diversity
among coaches generates a diversity in beliefs.
Race and Opinions About Athlete Protests
Race and sports are deeply intertwined. The history of racial exclusion from sports
(Widener, 2017), contemporary bias in media coverage and perceptions of athletes (Buff-
ington and Fraley, 2008), and a disproportionally low number of minority coaches all
make this clear. The latter led the National Football League to implement the Rooney
Rule, in 2003, which requires teams to intervie w at least one minority candidate in head
coaching searches. Diversity in the coaching ranks is an acute concern at the college level.
Lapchick (2017:2) states: “Opportunities for coaches of color continued to be a significant
area of concern in all divisions [of college sports].” Relative to the demographics of student
athletes, white coaches are notably overrepresented, particularly among head coaches.
1
The
low proportions of minority coaches likely reflect an entrenched history of institutional
racism (Martin, 2014) and limit the number of minority role models for athletes (Hoch,
2011).
The lack of minority coaches also may affect what players do when it comes to political
protests. To see why, consider that coaches have notable power and influence over their
players (Turman, 2006; Jayakumar and Comeaux, 2016): “[t]he relevancy then of coaches’
communication to athletes’ experience is sizeable” (Kassing and Anderson, 2014:174).
These communications, which range from formal rules to subtle gestures, are particularly
salient for college student athletes. Staurowsky (2014:23–24) explains:
In the netherworld that has existed for college athletes between bona fide workers and
students, their ability to access their rights becomes more difficult . . . The lives of college
athletes are routinely regulated in ways that distinguish them from their colleagues in
the general student population . . . coaches and athletic department personnel concerned
with the brand and the product have developed over the years a detailed set of guidelines
by which a thletes must live . . . in an atmosphere where questioning the status quo is not
welcome and with the expectation that players will not go public with their grievances for
1
In the 2016 season, the percentages of white head coaches, for men’s NCAA teams, were 86.1 percent in
Division I, 88.1 percent in Division II, and 91.7 percent in Division III. For women’s teams, the respective
numbers of white head coaches were 84.5, 87.5, and 91.6 percent (Lapchick, 2017:6). For assistant coaches,
the respective percentages of white coaches were 72.7, 73.1, and 85.1 percent (for men), and 74.2, 75.5, and
87 percent (for women) (Lapchick, 2017:7–8). This contrasts with the percentages of white student athletes,
which, respectively, for men’s and women’s teams, were 64.9 and 66 percent (across all divisions) (Lapchick,
2017:6).
Political Protesting, Race, and College Athletics 1011
fear of damaging the program and their own prospects, there is considerable risk associated
withplayeractivism ....”
2
This latter point implies: (1) coaches (and/or other athletic administrators) oppose
activism
3
and (2) they work to prevent it. We are unaware of systematic data on either
claim.
4
Our goal here is to partially address the first claim by exploring college coaches’
opinions when it comes to student athlete behavior. Instead of bluntly focusing on whether
to “allow” or “disallow” protests, we are particularly interested in sources of variance in
coaches’ opinions. We suspect race plays a substantial role in affecting coaches’ opinions,
and as a consequence, the aforementioned lack of diversity among college coaches leads to
a scarcity of perspectives within both universities and the NCAA writ large.
Why would race explain variance in opposition to or support for student athletes’
protests? Protests have played a significant role i n the history of black politics in the United
States, constituting an important and effective political resource for relatively disadvantaged
groups (Gillion, 2012; Lipsky, 1968). In addition to helping secure civil rights victories in
the 1960s and 1970s, protest maintains its importance to 21st-century minority politics.
African Americans who exhibit higher degrees of racial group consciousness are more likely
to engage in protests and boycotts (Chong and Rogers, 2005). Furthermore, alienation
in the form of cynicism toward traditional avenues of political influence has been shown
to lead to favorable protest orientations among African Americans (Jackson, 1973). As a
result, African Americans should be more inclined to prioritize the right to protest over
other considerations such as team unity or image maintenance.
Moreover, protests in the arena of athletics are often race based. One of the early modern
protests in sports involved University of Michigan football players threatening not to play
when one of their African-American teammates was asked not to participate (Epstein and
Kisska-Schulze, 2016:83–84). Sports history is rife with other examples of race protests (e.g.,
Epstein and Kisska-Schulze, 2016), with the best-known one being the 1968 Olympic Black
Power salute by two African-American sprinters (Bass, 2002).
5
More recently, attention
was drawn to the state of race relations in the United States when, in 2016, San Francisco
49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand during the national anthem prior to
games, as a way to protest racial injustice and police brutality in the United States (Rogers,
2016; Wyche, 2016). A number of professional, college, and high school athletes adopted
the practice (Breech, 2016; Associated Press, 2016; ESPN, 2016). Of particular note was
U.S. soccer player Megan Rapinoe, who protested (i.e., kneeled) while wearing the offi-
cial national team uniform (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/sports/soccer/megan-
rapinoe-anthem-protest-dividing-us-fans.html).
Such protests have prompted divergent reactions among the public. Opinion data suggest
that attitudes toward police are important predictors of support for the protests, but among
the most significant factors is race; African Americans prove more supportive than whites,
2
Journalist Shannon Ryan (2016) quotes Lane Demas, author of Integrating the Gridiron, as saying: “Today,
coaches and administrators still have tremendous power over these players . . . That’s probably the thing that’s
changed the least in the long history of American college sport.” Ryan further states that “college basketball
coaches, who are majority white, are delivering subtle and conflicting messages to t heir players, who are mostly
black, on how to express their voices when it comes to racial injustices.”
3
To be clear, Staurowsky (2014) duly recognizes and discusses, at length, variations in coaches’ opinions.
4
At the January 2017 NCAA annual meeting, chairs of each NCAA Division’s boards/councils expressed
support for athlete protests and activism, especially when they revolve around social justice (New, 2017). Even
so, there clearly is variance in the coaching ranks (New, 2017).
5
There also is a notable history of activism among student athletes when it comes to the enforce-
ment of Title IX, which precludes sex-based discrimination in athletics, inter alia (e.g., http://www.
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/02/AR2006110201530.html;
https://www.npr.org/2012/06/22/155529815/40-years-on-title-ix-still-shapes-female-athletes).
1012 Social Science Quarterly
with large differentials—74 percent of blacks versus 30 percent of whites approve (see
https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2387). It comes as no surprise that
race should explain the difference, given that many African Americans may well have lived
through or observed police brutality. Even those who have not experienced it themselves
likely feel a sense of linked fate—that is, the belief that what happens to blacks as a g roup
affects them as well (Simien, 2005; Gay and Tate, 1998; Herring, Jankowski, and Brown,
1999).
National anthem protests were not the only ones about racial issues to occur in sports
in recent years. In 2014, National Basketball Association players wore T-shirts that read
“I Can’t Breathe” during pregame warm-ups—another effort to call attention to police
violence against African Americans (Strauss, 2014).
6
This protest occurred at the college
level as well; for example, the entire Georgetown men’s basketball team wore “I Can’t
Breathe” T-shirts, as did female basketball players at Notre Dame (White, 2014; Associated
Press, 2014). Another protest occurred in 2015 at the University of Missouri, where football
players, unhappy with the university president’s handling of racial issues on campus, refused
to practice or play until the president resigned (Tracy and Southall, 2015).
7
Racial differences carry over into yet another issue that is often the subject of student
athlete protests. During games, some players have worn wristbands bearing the slogan
“APU,” which stands for “All Players United,” to protest NCAA rules forbidding com-
pensation of student athletes beyond scholarships (Patterson, 2013). Support for “pay for
play,” as well as allowing college athletes to unionize, also evinces a large racial gap: overall,
only about 33 percent favor paying college athletes and 47 percent support unionization,
but among nonwhites these numbers increase to 51 and 66 percent, respectively (Prewitt,
2014). Druckman, Howat, and Rodheim (2016) find that this racial gap operates through
a stark difference in the way pay for play and unionization are viewed—African Americans
are more likely to see these benefits as tools to remediate racial inequalities, which make
them more supportive.
In all of the above cases, then, race proves to be a powerful, if not decisive, explanatory
variable. African Americans, and nonwhites more broadly, tend to show far greater sensi-
tivity to the inequities being protested. Such awareness may manifest in political alienation
and other psychological dispositions that lend themselves to pro-protest orientations. As
they have in the past, political protests continue to serve as a means for minority groups to
express grievances and call for change. We therefore expect African-American coaches to
express considerably more support for student athletes’ protests.
8
Survey
Our population is all Division I and Division III coaches at NCAA schools. We fo-
cused on these two divisions since they offer a contrast; Division I schools can offer
athletic scholarships and often invest heavily in athletics, whereas Division III schools
6
Players for the Miami Heat also protested the 2012 shooting of African-American Trayvon Martin by
George Zimmerman by posting a photograph of team members wearing hooded sweatshirts and by displaying
messages such as “We want justice” on their shoes during a game (Boren, 2012; ESPN, 2012).
7
A statewide poll (see http://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/columbiatribune.com/content/
tncms/assets/v3/editorial/b/66/b66b9a67-7be1-5ee4-a8f9-dbc67a7b8c2a/564a417b8cbb3.pdf.pdf)showed
62 percent overall disapproval of the Missouri protests, but disaggregating by race revealed another sharp
difference: 63 percent of whites, but only 38 percent of African Americans, disapproved.
8
African-American coaches also may be more supportive of protests in response to their own personal
experiences of discrimination (e.g., Hope and Jagers, 2014).
Political Protesting, Race, and College Athletics 1013
neither offer scholarships nor invest heavily http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-
center/ncaa-101/our-three-divisions.
9
We obtained a full list of the 351 Division I
and the 451 Division III schools from the NCAA website http://web1.ncaa.org/
onlineDir/exec2/divisionListing. We then randomly selected 36 percent (127) of Di-
vision I schools and 14 percent (65) of Division III schools. We oversampled Division I
because we anticipated lower response rates given the likelihood of more solicitations of
these coaches and because Division I protests are more likely to be noticed given greater
media coverage. We then accessed the athletic department webpage for each selected school
and obtained the contact information for anyone in a coach position for every sport.
10
We
included any person in a position that (1) involved direct contact with student athletes
in an advisor y capacity and (2) was in the domain of athletic performance.
11
We defined
the population as such because we are interested in any individual who may be seen as
having some authority over a student athlete when it comes to athletics. This resulted in
a sample of 7,392 individuals to whom we sent e-mails, inviting them to participate in a
survey of college coaches focused on issues having to do with student athletes.
12
We assured
them of anonymity, mentioning that we would not ask them at which school they work.
The survey was mostly conducted from March 16 to March 24, 2017.
13
Nine hundred
sixty-five individuals clicked on the survey, for a response rate of 13 percent, which is in
line with online surveys of this sort (Couper, 2008). On the survey, we directly asked if
the person would describe himself/herself as “a coach (of any type).” Nine percent of the
respondents answered no; we exclude, from our final sample, anyone who did not answer
this question affirmatively, resulting in a sample of 873.
14
The survey asked various questions about three distinct protests by college student ath-
letes. The protests included (1) student athletes not standing during the national anthem to
protest police violence against the black community, (2) student athletes wearing wristbands
with the APU slogan to protest NCAA rules that forbid student athlete compensation, and
(3) student athletes wearing any apparel, aside from the APU wristbands, to protest any
political issue. The first two topics obviously isolate attitudes toward specific protests that
have occurred, while the third topic is meant to capture more general opinions. For each
of these topics, we included three types of questions, as follows:
r
Disapproval or approval of the particular form of protest, on a five-point scale ranging
from “completely disapprove” to “completely approve.”
9
Division II schools lie somewhere in between—they can offer partial athletic scholarships and typically
invest at levels less than Division I but greater than Division III (http://www.ncaa.org/about?division=d2).
10
Schools varied in terms of providing e-mail contact information directly on the athletic department
webpage. For those that did not provide e-mails on the webpage, we accessed the school directories to look
up contact information. A few schools in the initial sample neither listed e-mails on the athletic department
webpage nor had publicly accessible directories. We dropped those schools from the samples and randomly
selected replacements.
11
The former requirement means we excluded office managers, facility managers, equipment managers,
marketing personnel, and so forth. The latter requirement means that we excluded academic advisors, team
chaplains, and nutrition consultants. We did include any position coach, manager, video analyst (as they may
deal directly with the analysis of play), and recruiters. The full list of titles we included/excluded is available
from the authors.
12
Our initial sample was 7,753, but 361 e-mails bounced back (making for a 95.3 percent delivery rate). In
the invitation, we mentioned that the idea for the survey grew out of an undergraduate class project, which it
did. We sent two reminders.
13
We received a few responses (less than 5 percent of our sample) after March 24.
14
Many of the “non-coaches” listed their jobs as directors of operations, trainers, or video coordinators (we
may have misclassified some of these in our initial sampling due to lack of information on athletic department
websites; i.e., a lack of a clear job label for some individuals).
1014 Social Science Quarterly
r
Whether or not the respondent’s team should have a rule that prevents the given
protest, on a five-point scale from “definitely should not” to “definitely should.”
r
Whether or not each of three reasons was why a student athlete would engage in
the protest: caring about the issue, being under social pressure, and seeking personal
attention.
15
The respondent could check as few or many of the reasons as he or she
wanted.
As explanatory variables, the survey included measures of attitudes toward police, such
as police job approval, concern about brutality, treatment of minority suspects, and so
forth. We combined nine items in total (all of which are listed in the online Appendix,
available at http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/˜jnd260/publications.html)tocreatea
single measure of concern about police conduct (where higher values indicate greater
concern in general or about conduct toward minorities, as appropriate; ␣ = 0.77). We
gauged feelings of nationalism using four measures of American identity taken from Huddy
and Khatib (2007), combined into one scale (␣ = 0.82). We measured attitudes about
racial discrimination with an item asking respondents the extent to which they agree
that “racial discrimination is no longer a major problem in America” (thus higher scores
indicate a belief in less extant discrimination)—in what follows, we refer to this variable as
“discrimination skepticism.”
Respondents were asked which sports they coached (and whether it was a men’s team,
women’s team, or both), in which division (I or III) their school competed, their position
(which we then used to identify head coaches), how long they had worked in the coaching
field generally, and whether they played a sport in college. Finally, we included a number
of standard demographic and political variables, including race/ethnicity, gender, age,
income, education, political interest, and political ideology (with higher scores i ndicating
a movement toward being more conservative). All question wordings are provided in the
Appendix.
Results
Our sample ended up fairly diverse with 9 percent of the coaches being African American
and more than a third being women. The average ideology score skews slightly conservative
(3.8 on a seven-point scale, moving toward conservative). Further, the sample is very
experienced, having spent an average of roughly 14 years in the field, and there is variability
in the gender of the team coached (a bit more than half are men) as well as division (one-
third are Division III, which perfectly echoes our aforementioned sampling strategy).
16
Just under 40 percent of respondents are head coaches, and nearly 90 percent played a
sport in college. (Further sample details are available in the Appendix.)
Recall we included, for each protest, five outcome variables: support for the protest, belief
in a team rule against the protest, and beliefs about the protesters’ motivation being care
about the issue, social pressure, and/or attention seeking.
17
We present regression results for
each outcome with our main independent variable being a dummy indicator of whether the
15
A respondent also could enter “other” reasons.
16
Percentages of coaches in each sport are as follows: Basketball 15.2 percent, Soccer 12.8 percent,
Track and Field 11.7 percent, Football 11.5 percent, Volleyball 10.1 percent, Swimming 8.4 percent, Cross
Country 6.4 percent, Baseball 5.7 percent, Softball 5.3 percent, Golf 5.3 percent, Lacrosse 4.5 percent,
Tennis 4.0 percent. All other sports were represented by fewer than 4.0 percent of coaches in our sample.
17
For the latter three variables, we only included respondents who answered the general support measure
since that is a prerequisite to explaining why you oppose or support a protest.
Political Protesting, Race, and College Athletics 1015
respondent reported being an African American.
18
We included three types of control vari-
ables: (1) demographics including gender, age, income, and education; (2) political/social
attitudes including ideology, concern about police conduct, American identity, skepticism
about racial discrimination, and political interest; and (3) career characteristics including
playing a sport in college, coaching men, years in the field, head coach status, Division III
status, and coaching basketball or football (as these two sports stand out in terms of revenue
generation). We suspect conservatives and those with greater discrimination skepticism to
be less supportive of protests of any kind, as protests seek to change the status quo and tend
to be racialized (see Druckman, Howat, and Rodheim, 2016; Quinnipiac University Poll
2016). Police conduct concern and American identity may matter for the national anthem
and political apparel protests given their connections to police behavior and, potentially,
patriotism. We do not include these two variables in the APU models since that protest
is orthogonal to concerns about the police or patriotism (including the variables does not
change the results).
We present the results for the national anthem, APU, and political apparel protests, re-
spectively, in Tables 1–3.
19
We find that race is statistically significant and has a substantively
large effect in every model. African-American coaches, relative to non-African-American
coaches, display vastly more support for all three types of protest and clearly oppose team
rules that would disallow such protests. To gauge the substantive effect of race, we calculate
the predicted mean scores for non-African Americans and African Americans, holding all
other variables constant at their means (using Clarify; see King, Tomz, and Wittenberg,
2000). Recall, both the support and the team rule variables are five-point scales. African-
American coaches exhibit nearly a full point greater average support score (from 2.26
[SE = 0.05] to 3.17 [SE = 0.19]) for the national anthem protest, and are roughly a half
point (from 3.09 [SE = 0.06] to 2.62 [SE = 0.23]) more opposed to a team rule. We find
similar results for the APU and political apparel protests, albeit slightly smaller differences
in support. Specifically, support for APU protests increases from 3.04 (SE = 0.05) among
non-African Americans to 3.69 (SE = 0.18) among African Americans, and support for a
team rule against them decreases from 2.49 (SE = 0.05) to 1.88 (SE = 0.18). Support for
apparel protests increases from 2.64 (SE = 0.04) to 3.25 (SE = 0.16), a nd support for a
team r u le decreases from 2.90 (SE = 0.06) to 2.18 (SE = 0.21).
20
The race gap echoes the aforementioned divides in other populations (e.g., the public,
student athletes). Of equal, if not greater, importance are results on attributions for the
protests.
21
Across all three protests, we find African-American coaches, relative to non-
African-American coaches, are much more likely to believe the student athletes who protest
do so because they care about the issue. They report much lower scores on beliefs that the
protests stem from social pressure or an effort to garner personal attention. We calculate
the probability (holding all other variables at their mean scores) of believing the given
cause is why the student athletes protest. For the national anthem protest, there is a 0.92
18
We do not include variables for other races/ethnicities since our expectations revolve specifically around
African Americans rather than minorities in general. Practically, the sample also includes very few other
minorities (e.g., just 3 percent of the sample reported being Hispanic).
19
The Ns for the regressions shrink for two reasons. First, of the 873 coaches who started the survey, a fair
number rolled off, with 662 answering at least one of the three overall protest support questions. Second, there
was some nonresponse on three items: racial discrimination skepticism, American identity, and police conduct
concern batteries. The central results are robust if we exclude these variables.
20
While these race effects are quite notable, support even for African-American coaches is not extremely
high, never reaching an average score of 4 on the five-point support scale. Across the entire sample, support is
fairly low: 2.33 for the national anthem protest, 3.09 for the APU protest, and 2.68 for the political apparel
protest.
21
Recall that respondents could agree with multiple attributions.
1016 Social Science Quarterly
TABLE 1
National Anthem Protest
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Support Team Rule Care Pressure Attention
African American 0.907
∗∗∗
−0.457
∗
1.647
∗∗
−1.812
∗∗∗
−1.753
∗∗∗
(0.195) (0.243) (0.769) (0.521) (0.492)
Female −0.337
∗∗∗
0.207 −0.358 0.026 −0.012
(0.128) (0.160) (0.300) (0.249) (0.260)
Age 0.082 −0.090 −0.174 −0.252 −0.346
∗
(0.095) (0.119) (0.209) (0.185) (0.193)
Income 0.032 −0.049 0.178
∗
0.049 −0.040
(0.045) (0.056) (0.104) (0.087) (0.091)
Education 0.182
∗∗
−0.069 0.249 −0.006 −0.387
∗∗
(0.083) (0.104) (0.187) (0.163) (0.172)
Ideology −0.261
∗∗∗
0.244
∗∗∗
−0.291
∗∗∗
0.046 0.188
∗∗∗
(0.035) (0.044) (0.081) (0.069) (0.073)
Police concern 2.276
∗∗∗
−2.280
∗∗∗
2.746
∗∗∗
−0.313 −2.656
∗∗∗
(0.418) (0.523) (0.989) (0.812) (0.870)
American identity −0.302
∗∗∗
0.103 −0.037 −0.110 0.186
(0.086) (0.107) (0.204) (0.166) (0.174)
Discrim. skepticism −0.091 −0.002 −0.264 −0.045 0.072
(0.084) (0.105) (0.177) (0.163) (0.172)
Political interest 0.135
∗∗∗
−0.041 −0.095 0.003 0.075
(0.049) (0.062) (0.112) (0.095) (0.101)
Played sport −0.162 0.022 −0.024 −0.058 −0.146
(0.152) (0.192) (0.342) (0.296) (0.312)
Men’s coach 0.204
∗
−0.141 −0.232 −0.014 −0.200
(0.117) (0.147) (0.271) (0.229) (0.239)
Years in field −0.014
∗
−0.001 −0.022 −0.012 −0.005
(0.008) (0.010) (0.018) (0.016) (0.016)
Head coach −0.115 0.243
∗
0.385 0.443
∗∗
0.171
(0.112) (0.139) (0.252) (0.218) (0.226)
Division III 0.009 0.039 0.055 −0.048 0.017
(0.102) (0.127) (0.231) (0.197) (0.206)
Basketball −0.062 0.136 −0.066 0.179 0.179
(0.148) (0.189) (0.357) (0.291) (0.305)
Football −0.199 0.244 −0.338 0.412 0.501
(0.165) (0.206) (0.366) (0.327) (0.354)
Constant 1.485
∗∗
3.806
∗∗∗
−0.431 0.725 3.695
∗∗∗
(0.644) (0.806) (1.428) (1.246) (1.320)
Observations 545 542 545 545 545
R
2
/log-likelihood 0.436 0.236 −275.5 −353.2 −328.5
NOTE: Cell entries are OLS regression coefficients (for models 1–2)/logit coefficients (for models 3–5) with
associated SEs in parentheses. Statistical significance is denoted by:
∗∗∗
p ࣘ 0.01,
∗∗
p ࣘ 0.05,
∗
p ࣘ 0.1 for
two-tailed tests.
(SE = 0.06) chance that an African-American coach believes i t reflects caring about the
issue, compared to a 0.73 (SE = 0.02) chance of a non-African-American coach thinking
the same. This flips direction when it comes to believing the protests stem from attention
seeking, with the respective probabilities being 0.19 (SE = 0.07) and 0.57 (SE = 0.02).
This is remarkably high—nearly every African-American respondent believed caring about
the issue is a reason why student athletes protest when it comes to the national anthem. We
Political Protesting, Race, and College Athletics 1017
TABLE 2
All Players United Protest
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Support Team Rule Care Pressure Attention
African American 0.660
∗∗∗
−0.597
∗∗∗
1.975
∗∗∗
−1.310
∗∗∗
−1.573
∗∗∗
(0.193) (0.193) (0.745) (0.408) (0.472)
Female −0.396
∗∗∗
0.367
∗∗∗
−0.296 0.238 −0.282
(0.134) (0.134) (0.273) (0.243) (0.251)
Age −0.126 0.021 −0.144 −0.194 −0.077
(0.099) (0.100) (0.197) (0.180) (0.184)
Income −0.009 −0.040 −0.031 0.143
∗
−0.092
(0.047) (0.047) (0.094) (0.086) (0.087)
Education −0.049 0.042 −0.036 −0.008 0.086
(0.086) (0.086) (0.172) (0.156) (0.160)
Ideology −0.168
∗∗∗
0.219
∗∗∗
−0.178
∗∗∗
0.083 0.234
∗∗∗
(0.034) (0.034) (0.068) (0.061) (0.063)
Discrim. skepticism −0.242
∗∗∗
0.188
∗∗
−0.149 0.024 −0.105
(0.082) (0.082) (0.158) (0.148) (0.151)
Political interest 0.007 −0.031 0.020 0.069 −0.031
(0.051) (0.051) (0.103) (0.092) (0.094)
Played sport −0.105 −0.019 0.027 0.143 0.085
(0.161) (0.161) (0.323) (0.292) (0.298)
Men’s coach −0.045 0.052 0.005 0.039 −0.323
(0.123) (0.124) (0.250) (0.224) (0.231)
Years in field −0.004 0.005 −0.002 0.000 −0.002
(0.008) (0.008) (0.017) (0.015) (0.016)
Head coach −0.192
∗
0.129 0.080 0.431
∗∗
0.389
∗
(0.116) (0.117) (0.232) (0.211) (0.216)
Division III 0.037 −0.008 0.064 0.037 −0.196
(0.107) (0.107) (0.215) (0.193) (0.197)
Basketball −0.388
∗∗
0.444
∗∗∗
−0.097 0.036 0.315
(0.154) (0.156) (0.318) (0.282) (0.287)
Football −0.001 0.293
∗
0.054 0.329 0.295
(0.173) (0.174) (0.362) (0.319) (0.325)
Constant 3.916
∗∗∗
1.918
∗∗∗
1.806 −0.485 −1.147
(0.618) (0.620) (1.226) (1.123) (1.143)
Observations 548 545 548 548 548
R
2
/log-likelihood 0.175 0.175 −308.4 −365.3 −352.9
NOTE: Cell entries are OLS regression coefficients (for models 1–2)/logit coefficients (for models 3–5) with
associated SEs in parentheses. Statistical significance is denoted by:
∗∗∗
p ࣘ 0.01,
∗∗
p ࣘ 0.05,
∗
p ࣘ 0.1 for
two-tailed tests.
see similar movements for the APU and political apparel protests.
22,23
In short, African-
American coaches not only differ in their opinions about the protests, but also in terms of
22
African Americans have a 0.94 (SE = 0.04) probability of believing an APU protester would care about the
issue, compared to a 0.71 (SE = 0.02) probability for all other coaches. For apparel protests, these probabilities
are 0.92 (SE = 0.05) and 0.75 (SE = 0.02), respectively. African-American coaches have a 0.15 (SE = 0.06)
probability of believing an APU protester would be seeking attention, compared to a probability of 0.44 (SE =
0.02) for non-African Americans. These probabilities are 0.39 (SE = 0.08) and 0.59 (SE = 0.02), respectively,
for apparel protests.
23
When we enter the attribution variables as independent variables in the overall support models, we find
that the “care” and “attention” variables are always significant (see Table A1). There is some evidence of partial
mediation of the race main effect, although in all cases the race variable remains highly significant. In other
words, attributions affect support with “care” generating more support and “attention” leading to less support
but the impact of race does not work entirely through those variables.
1018 Social Science Quarterly
TABLE 3
Political Apparel Protest
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Support Team Rule Care Pressure Attention
African American 0.621
∗∗∗
−0.724
∗∗∗
1.513
∗∗
−0.854
∗∗
−0.820
∗∗
(0.170) (0.227) (0.652) (0.388) (0.382)
Female −0.071 0.104 −0.870
∗∗∗
−0.331 −0.381
(0.113) (0.152) (0.299) (0.245) (0.251)
Age −0.069 0.081 −0.070 −0.100 −0.321
∗
(0.084) (0.112) (0.209) (0.180) (0.186)
Income −0.005 −0.034 0.156 0.156
∗
0.096
(0.040) (0.053) (0.102) (0.086) (0.089)
Education −0.044 0.020 0.312
∗
0.012 0.006
(0.073) (0.097) (0.182) (0.156) (0.161)
Ideology −0.125
∗∗∗
0.151
∗∗∗
−0.277
∗∗∗
0.045 0.111
(0.031) (0.042) (0.081) (0.068) (0.070)
Police concern 1.994
∗∗∗
−1.729
∗∗∗
0.908 −0.615 −0.912
(0.366) (0.490) (0.942) (0.789) (0.813)
American identity −0.102 0.024 0.033 −0.134 0.163
(0.075) (0.101) (0.204) (0.163) (0.166)
Discrim. skepticism −0.011 0.002 −0.215 −0.129 0.159
(0.074) (0.099) (0.176) (0.160) (0.167)
Political interest 0.100
∗∗
−0.012 0.175 0.077 0.070
(0.043) (0.058) (0.110) (0.093) (0.097)
Played sport 0.093 0.233 0.145 −0.126 0.614
∗∗
(0.135) (0.181) (0.342) (0.292) (0.298)
Men’s coach 0.029 −0.234
∗
−0.148 −0.075 −0.316
(0.103) (0.138) (0.268) (0.223) (0.230)
Years in field −0.008 0.001 −0.036
∗∗
−0.026
∗
−0.007
(0.007) (0.010) (0.018) (0.016) (0.016)
Head coach −0.014 0.074 0.166 0.198 0.180
(0.098) (0.132) (0.249) (0.212) (0.217)
Division III −0.161
∗
0.010 0.039 −0.184 −0.004
(0.090) (0.121) (0.230) (0.194) (0.200)
Basketball −0.037 0.108 −0.673
∗∗
0.065 0.432
(0.131) (0.177) (0.330) (0.284) (0.297)
Football −0.020 0.310 −0.523 0.245 −0.004
(0.146) (0.195) (0.364) (0.316) (0.325)
Constant 2.606
∗∗∗
2.723
∗∗∗
−0.547 0.361 0.847
(0.564) (0.756) (1.402) (1.210) (1.251)
Observations 545 542 545 545 545
R
2
/log-likelihood 0.302 0.174 −279.8 −366.3 −351
NOTE: Cell entries are OLS regression coefficients (for models 1–2)/logit coefficients (for models 3–5) with
associated SEs in parentheses. Statistical significance is denoted by:
∗∗∗
p ࣘ 0.01,
∗∗
p ࣘ 0.05,
∗
p ࣘ 0.1 for
two-tailed tests.
what they think about the motivations of student athletes who engage in protests. These
attributions may affect how coaches treat players and the types of expectations they establish
(e.g., viewing student athletes more as attention seekers than individuals who care about
issues). To be clear, we take no normative position on whether protests should or should
not be encouraged/allowed—the message of our findings is simply that the aforementioned
lack of diversity in coaching ranks creates a distinctive environment around these issues.
Political Protesting, Race, and College Athletics 1019
Aside from our race result, we find that political ideology has a consistent significant
effect across outcome variables (other than the social pressure motivation and, for the
general apparel protest, the attention-seeking motivation). As individuals become more
conservative, they are significantly more likely to oppose protests and support team rules
against protests, and less likely to believe the protesting student athletes do so because they
care about the issue. For the anthem and APU protests, conservatives also believe to a
greater degree that the protesting reflects attention seeking. Thus, we find that race is not
the only substantive factor here; coaches (regardless of race) with a liberal bent prove more
likely to support the protests and to view their purposes in a positive light.
For the anthem and political apparel protests, we find that concern about the police leads
to significantly greater support for the protest and less support for the rule (and for the
anthem, affects attributions of “care” and “attention”). This appears sensible insofar as the
anthem protest explicitly focused on police brutality and several political apparel protests
have been aimed at the police (e.g., Strauss, 2014). For the APU protest, skepticism of racial
discrimination significantly decreases support for the protest and increases support for a
team rule. This coheres with prior work that finds a substantial racial element to opinions
about student athlete benefits (Druckman, Howat, and Rodheim, 2016).
24
Finally, it is
intriguing that female coaches are, all else constant, less s upportive of the national anthem
and APU protests. The former protest is not particularly gendered but the APU has a
gender component—unionization of and/or compensation for student athletes could have
negative implications for female athletics (e.g., Boyle, 2016). We suspect that had we
explored protests on other issues, particularly those concerning gender equity (i.e., Title
IX enforcement), our results on gender and perhaps on race would have been different.
When it comes to other variables, we are hesitant to make inferences given that some will
be significant by chance, given the number of models run.
25
Conclusion
The landscape of sports is rapidly changing, and this is clear when it comes to college
athletics. A media transformation has made college sports, of all kinds, regularly available
to fans and alumni (e.g., Nixon, 2014:41–44), and this visibility often puts student athletes
under a microscope with their behaviors routinely monitored. It also means that student
athletes have a platform to take stands on issues, including those of direct relevance to
themselves (e.g., the APU protest) or the larger society (e.g., the national anthem protest).
Whether and to what extent it is appropriate for student athletes to use their visibility to
make political statements is a thorny issue. They represent a team and a school and, at
least for scholarship athletes, have agreed to abide by certain rules (e.g., training rules).
Protests invariably involve taking one side on an issue, and doing so can be polarizing
and/or counter to the school’s interest. But student athletes also are students, and thus
otherwise free to engage in the types of protests studied here. Our goal was to not settle
what is or is not appropriate. Rather, we sought to understand the opinions of coaches who
play a central role in what student athletes can and/or want to do. Our findings accentuate
24
The inconsistent role of discrimination skepticism for the other protests likely reflects its strong relationship
with police conduct concern, which is a more proximate cause of opinions in those cases (i.e., the two correlate
at −0.52).
25
Some of the other findings, however, are sensible such as more political interest leading to greater support
for protests, and coaching high-revenue sports making one less supportive of the APU.
1020 Social Science Quarterly
the central place of race in matters of sport: as with so many other issues concerning sports,
race is central when it comes to attitudes about protests.
Our results suggest that the lack of diversity among college coaches is not just a matter
of numbers but also involves beliefs. This raises the question: To what extent and how
do coaches’ opinions affect student athletes? While it seems relatively clear that coaches
possess power and influence (e.g., Kassing and Anderson, 2014), more work is needed
to identify, in the domain of college athletics, how that influence manifests. Past work
illustrates the impact of coaches’ backgrounds and views on how they relate to and care for
players within college sports (e.g., Fisher et al., 2017; Newman and Weiss, 2018; Roxas and
Ridinger, 2016). However, it remains unclear just how far such dynamics extend to adjacent
domains such as athletes’ political activities. This is tricky, in part, because student athletes
assuredly choose their schools/teams due to the presence of coaches who act in particular
ways and hold specific attitudes. There is therefore a need to explore coach–student athlete
interactions at the recruiting stage as well as throughout the student athletes’ careers.
Attention also needs to be paid to coaches’ public statements (e.g., via media outlets) that
can influence student athletes’ expectations. What we have shown is that race—as well as
ideology, gender, and other attributes—likely plays a crucial rule in how coaches navigate
the politicization of sports. This continued politicization means that coaches and athletes
face choices that have political ramifications. Unraveling the nature of coach and student
athlete relationships is of critical importance for understanding contemporary politics.
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