White HBCU kickers a thing
Many theories why specialists mostly nonblack
When Granville Eastman was Austin Peay’s defensive coordinator several years ago, his team frequently played Tennessee State, a historically black university in Nashville.
Every time Tennessee State sent players onto the field who were not black, he recalled half-jokingly last week, “that’s when you knew they were punting.”
Now Eastman is the interim head coach at another historically black university, North Carolina Central, and opposing coaches can say similar things about his team. The Eagles’ place-kicker is white. Same goes for the long snapper and the punter, who also holds the ball on field goals. An Italian, who is also white, handles the kickoffs.
In this respect, NC Central is unremarkable among historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. Just a handful of the specialists featured on the roughly two dozen HBCU football teams in Division I identify as black. Many, like Delaware State’s punter and place-kicker, are Latino; others, like NC Central place-kicker Adam Lippy, are white.
“I mean, you certainly stand out,” said Lippy, whose high school was mostly black, “but it’s not in a negative way or anything.”
Grambling State has a Latino place-kicker and a white punter. Alabama State’s punter, place-kicker and long snapper are white, while Alabama A&M has a white punter and a white place-kicker but a black long snapper. Arkansas-Pine Bluff ’s kicker/punter is white and originally from Scotland.
Marquette King of the Denver Broncos, the most prominent black punter in the sport at any level, attended Fort Valley State University, a Division II HBCU, before joining the Oakland Raiders as an undrafted free agent in 2012. The dearth of black kickers and punters is notable throughout Division I college football, where the majority of players are black, and in the NFL, where roughly twothirds are. It has been this way for a while. An ESPN The Magazine article found that in 2010 just one of the 120 teams in college football’s top tier fielded a black kicker or punter in a game.
“You look at your demographics and the majority of your clients, and by all means I’d say the majority is white,” said Chris Sailer, who runs a popular kicking and punting camp.
HBCU rosters have long featured the occasional white player — the 1981 television movie “Grambling’s White Tiger” told the true story of Grambling’s first white quarterback. It starred Caitlyn Jenner, when she was known as Bruce. (Harry Belafonte played the Grambling coach, Eddie Robinson, one of college football’s giant figures.)
But even with all this context, seeing mainly white or Latino kickers on HBCU teams is still striking. While 23 percent of HBCU students identify as nonblack, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, the proportion of black players on their Division I football teams hovers at about 95 percent. At North Carolina Central, for instance, the roster of nearly 100 players contains just five who are not black — the four specialists and an offensive lineman.
There are as many theories for why there are so few black kickers and punters as there are black kickers and punters at HBCUs — which is to say, just a few. A caveat — these are just theories, some flimsier than others.
Javaunie Francis, a black punter at the HBCU Bethune-Cookman, posited that black athletes are disdainful of those positions.
“A lot of black guys feel like, being a kicker or punter, you’re soft,” he said. “They don’t really want to do that type of stuff.”
It should be noted that people of all races have shared these sentiments.
Others point to socioeconomics, since poverty rates in many states are higher among African-Americans than other races, and honing the crafts of kicking or punting can require expensive personal coaching. Also, until recently, many colleges hoarded their full football scholarships for nonspecialists, so football players who came from families that needed financial aid had an incentive to play another position.
And then there is soccer. Many kickers and punters are converted soccer players, and soccer is increasingly perceived as a predominantly white, suburban sport in this country. It has struggled to cultivate participation among African-Americans in urban areas.
“Most of our kickers do have a background in soccer,” said Obie Egekeze, an instructor at Chris Sailer Kicking.
In this light, Francis, the Bethune-Cookman specialist, seems like an exception who partly proves the rule: a black punter who is also international — he was born in Jamaica — and is a converted soccer player. He first punted a football at his Miami high school when, during track practice one day, he booted an errant football back toward his school’s squad on the field.
In past decades there were few full scholarships available for college punters, but these days there are more — and more than there are for college soccer players, who often only receive partial scholarships. Francis pursued punting, he said, “because I didn’t want my family to pay for me to go to school.”
Lippy, the NC Central kicker, was perhaps an even more unlikely case. Growing up, his parents pointed him toward soccer, basketball and baseball. But as a freshman at Tucker High School in suburban Atlanta, his soccer coach urged him to try out for the football team because the place-kicker was about to graduate.
A soccer defender, Lippy had to adjust his kicking mechanics. He played center back and frequently stabbed at the ball with his foot to clear it out of a danger zone; to kick a football he had to always follow through down the field. He raided YouTube to study up, quaffing the highlights of Georgia’s Marshall Morgan and Texas’ Justin Tucker, now a two-time Pro Bowler for the Baltimore Ravens.
Lippy had not considered an HBCU before NC Central’s offer arrived during his senior year.
“I looked them up and was like, ‘Oh, they play Western Michigan, they play Duke, they went to the Celebration Bowl,’ ” Lippy said.
His partial scholarship made his tuition much less expensive than it would have been at one of the Division III schools that wanted him to kick, such as Georgia’s Berry College, he said.
Lippy recently described his time at NC Central as “a normal college experience.”
On a visit during the winter of his senior year, the special teams coach raised “the elephant in the room” with Lippy.
Roughly 13 percent of HBCU students are white and another 3 percent are Latino, according to Marybeth Gasman, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
In this light, the way Lippy and other nonblack kickers and punters have found roster spots — and scholarship money — at HBCUs is arguably in keeping with the institutions’ missions.
“I know what our culture and our history is,” said Eastman, the NC Central coach. “To me, this school has always been a school that’s offered opportunity. That’s what’s available here. It’s not a minority opportunity. It’s an opportunity.”