Kalekeni Mtalika Banda, the Wisconsin men’s soccer coach, resigned his post just a few hours after Florida football coach Steve Spurrier announced he would be leaving the Gators to pursue a career in the National Football League. Forgive Banda if he failed to make the front page.
Forgive the athletic department if they cheered when he did not.
See, the coach’s departure could have been quite an embarrassment for the school. Banda was nothing special as the head of UW’s soccer program. The Badgers were just 37-58-4 in his career, and even the program’s current selling point — 20 wins in the last two years — is unimpressive. But in the Wisconsin athletic program, Banda had been something extraordinary.
Like his father, a diplomat from Malawi who brought Banda to New York as a child, Banda was a sort of ambassador. He represented the only black head coach in a varsity sport at Wisconsin. For now, there are none. Zero.
The issue has been on the forefront for the NCAA, which has just four non-white head football coaches, and in professional leagues where the number of minority coaches is vastly disproportional to number of minority players.
The NFL made headlines when two of its three black coaches (Dennis Green and Tony Dungy) were dismissed and, consequently, Commissioner Paul Tagliabue issued a statement “encouraging” league owners to consider minority candidates for any coaching vacancies. Then baseball grabbed attention when former World Series-winning manager Whitey Herzog claimed black candidates were keeping white coaches from interviewing for jobs.
What does all this have to do with Banda? It serves to underscore the sort of climate in which athletic departments are clamoring to retain minority coaches and administrators. Just five days before Banda resigned, University of Notre Dame made history by hiring Tyrone Willingham as its first black head coach ever.
Yet Wisconsin let Banda slip away. Why? And why now, when a coach who was pressured throughout his career to produce or be dismissed was coming off his best season?
For background, note there was more racial intrigue behind Banda’s tenure than just his stature as UW’s only minority coach. Banda was at times resented for bringing in foreign players to replenish a roster depleted by a rash of transfers that followed the firing of Jim Launder in 1996. Banda’s critics wondered why he turned to the Caribbean and elsewhere while there was a fine crop of Wisconsin players to recruit.
In other words, while there are plenty of white kids to fill the roster instead.
To be fair, as Banda curtailed the program’s tumult he was able to bring in more local kids; hence, last fall’s freshman class featured five players from Wisconsin or Illinois. In the last three years, Banda attracted three Wisconsin-produced players to transfer back to UW, most notably all-Big Ten forward Dominic DaPra.
So it’s ironic Banda stepped out, on his own terms, for racial reasons.
The 49-year-old coach says his desire to leave was motivated by a need for his children to “be exposed to a more culturally and racially diverse set of life experiences.”
Needless to say, he didn’t feel he would find that in Wisconsin.
Which is fairly pathetic. Wisconsin is so white it forced the athletic department’s lone pillar of diversity to search for darker pastures. How does that measure up with the university’s publicly stated efforts to increase the school’s minority density?
The problem is the same as all the others facing Wisconsin when trying to recruit a diverse student body: minority students do not want to come to an atmosphere where their sense of “minority-ness” is reinforced by the wall of white faces surrounding them. Banda’s situation shows how this might be as easily true for administrators, coaches and faculty as students.
Wisconsin will hire a new soccer coach, and hopefully, white or black, he will be the best choice to lead the team to success. The shame is that, as Banda Bola rolls away, the University of Wisconsin seems to be heading nowhere.
