In the 1972 football season, two African-American coaches broke a color barrier that had stood for most of a century.
One was Don Hudson at Macalester College, and the other was Ron Stratten of Portland State University.
Stratten, who coached at Portland State from 1972 through 1974, retired as an NCAA vice president in 2007. He recently recalled his landmark experience:
Ron Stratten: I know that a gentleman named Matthew Bullock coached Massachusetts in the 1900s, but I’m not aware of any other African-Americans who coached at white schools before I got the Portland State job. Many articles cite Willie Jeffries at Wichita State in 1979, but he was the first African-American coach at a Division I-A institution.
Jack Scott hired Cass Jackson at Oberlin in 1973, and Howard Cosell made a big deal out it and ran a program about him being the first black football coach at a white school. But my first year at Portland State was 1972. All of my alums got angry and wrote Cosell letters and complained, but he never recanted.
R.S.: Yes, when I was 16, my aspiration was to be an assistant coach for 10 years and then become a head coach. But when I was a kid, I had no idea about how people were not allowed to have those opportunities.
R.S.: I was on the staff at Oregon when Jerry Frei left as head coach. Some of the coaches who remained were involved in screening candidates for the new head coach, and our analysis was that none of them knew the passing game very well at all. My grad assistant, Gunther Cunningham (who would go on to coach the Kansas City Chiefs), told me that I ought to apply for the job myself — and I did — but our offensive line coach Dick Enright got the job. He hired Don Read, the head coach at Portland State, to be his offensive line coach.
The people at Portland State had heard of me and asked me to interview for their head coaching job, and I got it. Len Casanova, the former Oregon coach, told me not to take it. He said that nobody’s going to pay any attention to you, you’re not going to have any resources and you’re not going to have the best opportunity to advance. And of course I didn’t, but I took the job anyway. There weren’t a lot of opportunities available.
R.S.: Not as much as you might think. I recruited Portland and knew it while I was at Oregon, so I knew a lot of people there. I don’t think they gave it a great deal of thought. In the interviews, they didn’t ask me anything about being an African-American and whether I could do the job.
R.S.: There were no problems with race. We didn’t have enough players — there were only 21 on the roster when I showed up because Don relied so heavily on JC players. And the problems that I had assembling a staff were about having no money, not about race.
Boosters were a different story. I just felt I didn’t have a lot of their support when it came to raising money. But I never really did feel much racism. My feeling was about us winning football games and going from 1-10 to 4-6 and getting better. Portland State was a pretty liberal, understanding place. They gave me every opportunity to succeed.
R.S.: I was miserable and wasn’t having any fun. It was a shock to everybody — to the players and the coaches. My defensive coordinator told me I should stay. There was a huge amount of flak about the decision, but I decided it was what I wanted to do, and so I left.
R.S.: You have to know your football, but be prepared for things that you don’t think are important. You have to understand the nuances of the process, and you have to have a plan in place. You must have done research on the institution and its needs. You have to understand the people who are involved and what their values are.
And you have to understand that it’s not just about football. Many coaches lose the game right there because it’s about a heck of a lot more than football.