Chart: The Globe’s survey of college athletic departments shows troubling racial data

Peter Roby served as AD at Northeastern from 2007 to 2018. He has advocated for diversity in athletic leadership since he cocaptained the Dartmouth basketball team in the 1970s. Yet Black men like him are rarely offered the opportunity to become athletic directors, according to diversity advocates.Jon Chase photo

You can count the number of Black collegiate athletic directors in New England on one hand.

A new survey by the Boston Globe found that of 112 colleges and universities in the region, only five – 4.5 percent – employ a Black AD.

Take it a step further, and only one of the 15 Division 1 athletic departments in the area is led by a Black man: Holy Cross, which hired Marcus Blossom away from Boston College in 2019.

Joining Blossom are Vaughn Williams – recently hired by Bentley University after working as a senior administrator at BC – plus three others: Anthony Grant at MIT, Lauren Haynie at Brandeis, and Darlene Gordon, who is the interim replacement for the retired Charlie Titus at UMass Boston.

The survey, completed by the Globe’s Bob Hohler, looked into the data, which also tells us that the number of Black head football coaches is even worse.

There are 58 head football coaches in New England college sports. Only two are Black, and they both lead Division 3 teams: Malik Hall at Bates College in Maine and C.C. Grant at the US Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut.

According to NCAA data, 10.3 percent of ADs around the nation are Black. That’s more than double the rate of schools in New England.

But take it farther: Exclude Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and the percentage of Black ADs drops to 6.6 percent. That’s still nearly twice as high as New England’s 3.3 percent.

“The percentages tell the true story,” former Patriots player Garin Veris, who became Massachusetts Maritime Academy’s first Black athletic director in 2015, told Hohler. “What’s going on in New England is really sad.”

Read Hohler’s full story about the lack of progress, the opportunities to change that weren’t taken, and where colleges could go from here.