UNC announced Monday that longtime assistant coach Hubert Davis would be promoted to replace Roy Williams as the Tar Heels' new head basketball coach.
The selection is significant for several reasons. Davis continues the tradition of the UNC basketball head coach coming from the Carolina family, a deep network that consists of UNC basketball alumni. Davis was also Williams' apparent choice to succeed him on the sideline.
Davis’ hiring also sets another major milestone for UNC. He now becomes the first Black head coach at UNC in a major revenue sport, and just the fourth Black head coach ever in any UNC sport.
In Davis’s words, this milestone is “significant.”
It becomes even more important when you consider the racial breakdown of college basketball as a whole. It is currently a sport overwhelmingly made up of young Black players, but led by white coaches.
Within the Power 5 conferences — Big Ten, ACC, Big 12, SEC and Pac-12 — only 26 percent of players are white, yet 83 percent of head coaches are white.
Out of the 77 coaches to have led a college basketball team this previous season at the Power Six level (Power 5 plus Big East), just 13 are Black. One reason there are so few college basketball coaches of color is a lack of diversity in the hiring process.
One of the 13 Black coaches, Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing, pointed to a lack of representation among athletic directors in a 2020 interview.
“People hire people that look like them,” Ewing said. “It’s not necessarily racist. Most of the time you hire a person you can relate to.”
