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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 wearing a gorilla mask at ETSU just five years ago.
And of all the places where David Curtiss Stephenson could be buried, or for that matter find sanctuary from his sex-offending, KKK past, it was Washington County.
But even with this disturbing legacy, ETSU has generally been able to hire talented coaches through the years for their men’s basketball program, albeit all white until now.
There simply aren’t that many coaching jobs out there. A six-figure salary at a Division I program with 19 winning seasons in the past 21 years is a desirable position for almost any men’s basketball coach, even if the location one must coach in is undesirable.
- That said, one must wonder if ETSU is trying to cut some costs when one looks…
