The Situations Around New ETSU Basketball Coach Desmond Oliver
Anthem Kneeling, Transfers, Wes Miller, Communication, Questions of Race, Etc.
- When Jason Shay resigned as East Tennessee State head men’s basketball coach, there was a feeling the Buccaneers would have to settle for second best to find a coach.
They didn’t.
But make no doubt, upper east Tennessee didn’t just become a racist area when the Buccaneers knelt for the anthem last season.
Erwin still purged all of their African-American population 100 years ago and to this day is still painfully less than diverse.
Gerald Sensabaugh is still blackballed from coaching for nothing more than speaking out against the establishment at David Crockett High School. He therefore became the “uppity black man” to the less accomplished administration at the school, and unhirable to other school boards afraid he’d upset the status quo.
David Crockett High is located in Jonesborough, where in the 1990s a convenience store openly sold T-Shirts of a hooded Ku Klux Klansmen with the caption “The Original Boys in the Hood.”
My own personal first memory of ETSU sports is the band impersonating the KKK.
As discussed in the link above, Tristan Rettke was approaching protesters of color…
