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thedrifter
07-04-07, 04:54 AM
Posted on Wed, Jul. 04, 2007
Roles are reversed at some schools
Coaches at historically black colleges encourage diversity in their college football programs
By PATRICK OBLEY
pobley@thestate.com

Virtually every school in the country can readily state when its first black football player made his debut.

Willie Jeffries remembers the day the first white player stepped onto the football field at North Carolina A&T.

“John Andrews,” Jeffries said with a flourish. “Coach Mel Groomes and I went down to Camp Lejune. John was coming out of the Marines.”

The year was 1969, and, while black athletes had been playing for white colleges and universities for several years, seeing a historically black college turn the tables and recruit white athletes marked a new era in college sports.

The color of a player’s skin no longer would be the most important factor in building a program.

In 1969, Jeffries’ world had been turned upside down by, of all things, integration. His highly successful tenure as football coach at Granard High in Gaffney ended abruptly when the school was closed and its students melded in with Gaffney High.

Jeffries took the first job he could find, joining Groomes’ staff in the spring of 1969. Andrews, who was finishing his tour of duty with the Marines, was to be his first recruit.

“We didn’t have a center, and that’s what he played,” Jeffries said.But a white guy on a historically black college’s campus?

“Well, yeah ... you wonder about the kid being a minority,” Jeffries said. “His family had a problem with him going there, and so did his friends when he came out.”

Three years later, Jeffries took over at South Carolina State. On that team was the Bulldogs’ first white player, Sid Savoy.

“He fell right in with them,” Jeffries said of Savoy. “He even belonged to one of the black fraternities.”

In fact, Savoy was a member of Groove Phi Groove, a fraternity that, according to its literature, asked each its members to be “cool, suave and debonair” and an “open, conscious, laid-back brother.”

Savoy’s easy success at blending in with South Carolina State’s black student body led Jeffries to a revelation.

“You know, I don’t think any white kid would be interested in coming to a black school if he couldn’t handle it in the first place,” he said.

Make no mistake — the floodgates have never opened for whites at black colleges and likely never will.

That said, current S.C. State coach Buddy Pough said he’s trying his best to put together a football program that accurately depicts the school’s overall racial makeup. The presence of kicker Stephen Grantham does just that, since one white player among the 65 on scholarship amounts to about the same percentage as the student body’s 3 percent white population.

“We actually try to recruit white players,” Pough said. “We’d like to have more white players, and we’ve made that effort to diversify ourselves and, ultimately, reflect the population of the state.”

There is more to Pough’s goal than simple demographic representation. The bottom line in college football is winning. To win, it behooves Pough to land the best players, black or white.

“We have not been successful in that regard,” Pough said.

MORE THAN SKIN DEEP

Grantham was an all-state kicker out of West Florence High. Coming from a family of doctors, his goal was to fall in line with the family business. When schools kept asking him to walk on, Pough swooped in with an offer of a full scholarship.

“You can come here, not have to pay and get the chance to play immediately,” Pough said. “Those things are usually enough for a specialist like Stephen.”

Once Grantham was on campus, Pough made sure to keep tabs on his quality of life.

“You want to make sure they’re doing good in school and that they’re comfortable,” Pough said.

In South Carolina, as is the case with most Southern states, there are many schools at which the white population is the minority. Benedict College defensive coordinator Robbie Wells grew up in such a situation. Like any minority, Wells was aware of the overwhelming majority. He became accustomed to the situation.

“People always ask me if it was a culture shock when I went to coach at S.C. State or now at Benedict,” Wells said. “It hasn’t been anything like that.”

Wells’ high school was 98 percent black. His first high school coaching job was at C.E. Murray, whose student body is 98 percent black.

Though white players attend and often thrive at historically black colleges, the perception remains that whites must be uncomfortable in the presence of an overwhelming black majority.

Former S.C. State linebacker Cody Lucas said such characterizations are simplistic.

“I’m not going to lie — it is a little different,” said Lucas, who was the lone white player during his time at S.C. State from 2002-04 before transferring to USC.

“But I don’t know why people see any difference,” he said. “Bad people are bad people, whether they are white or black.”

Lucas said in the beginning there were a few teammates who objected to his presence. Within two days of being on campus, one player picked a fight.

“You being white, coming into their territory ... some can’t accept it,” Lucas said. “I got into that fight, but once they saw I had the same amount of heart and desire as they did, that all went away. After all the B.S. was out of the way, it was all football.”

Well, almost.

“The most hell I caught was from other teams,” Lucas said with a laugh.

He recalled a game against Florida A&M, whose offensive linemen were quick to point out Lucas.

“They started saying, ‘Oh, look now, we’ve got a white boy today,’” Lucas said. “It’s all in fun, but on the field it gets serious.”FAMU had one white player on the field that day as well — the quarterback. While there is no way to know for certain, Lucas believes he might have written his way into the black college football annals on the first play of the game.

“I intercepted a pass,” Lucas said, laughing. “It might have been the first time in black college football that a white player picked off a white quarterback.”

THE RACE TO ERASE RACE

Jeffries and Pough believe any perception of racial tension has been propagated by an aging and increasingly disconnected elder generation that was raised during segregation.

“We seem to always continue to rehash and deal with these issues over and over again,” Pough said. “I hope we’ll get to a point where that’s not an issue.”

“Absolutely,” Jeffries added. “What’s happening now is we’re getting on, well past 1968, ’69 and ’70 and the advent of integration. It’s only logical that kids these days get along so well.”

The other lingering perception about HBCU football programs is that their facilities are a cut below other schools, making it difficult to recruit top players, regardless of race. What has happened on the S.C. State and Benedict campuses refutes that. Benedict opened a state-of-the-art football stadium last fall that quickly was lauded by other NCAA Division II programs as one of the nation’s finest. Meanwhile, S.C. State installed a new FieldTurf surface and erected a cutting-edge DiamondVision scoreboard.

“We’ve done a pretty decent job of changing some of those perceptions,” Pough said.And he has seen the effect.

“We are now beginning to feel like we can recruit against anybody,” Pough said. “It makes no difference what color the kid is, once we set our sights on him. If he’s being recruited by the Wofford and Furmans, then we’re going to be right there, too.”

In the end, success is not possible if a school isn’t going after the best available players. Wells believes today’s youth understand skin color is something that should not be taken into account.

“In all my years doing this, I’ve found there’s one constant,” Wells said. “All kids want to win. They want to win and they want leadership. If you give them that, you can be any color you want.”

If you are an elite player and considering S.C. State, consider Pough’s color to be tickled pink.

“It’s a great opportunity for kids of all other races to get into here at S.C. State,” he said. “That’s because we want them so desperately. I don’t think they realize we want what everybody else wants — the best of all worlds.”

Reach Obley at (803) 771-8473.

Ellie