Diversity

U. S., is joining dozens of other basketball coaches to discuss issues of race and discrimination amid the social unrest that has gripped the nation.

“He was trying to incite me the whole time,” Martin said during a panel discussion Friday with members of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. “Luckily for me I didn’t say anything to him, and he left and I left” — after not one but two tickets — “but in retrospect my biggest failure is that I never took action afterward.”

The NABC already has released a list of recommendations for college coaches. Among the suggestions are holding inperson or virtual meetings to discuss current events

and racial injustice; establishing Election Day as an annual team day off and helping student-athletes register to vote; holding in-person and virtual meetings with local law enforcement and community leaders; and encouraging teams to be advocates on campus and society in general.

The discussion Friday came the same day Texas State ordered an investigation into a former player’s allegations of racist remarks by basketball coach Danny Kaspar — allegations athletic director Larry Teis called “deeply troubling.”

“I think we’re all basically going to be affected by this similarly,” Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said. “This has motivated me to hug my players. Hug my family. Take care of them, but also give them a platform. I gave all our

kids a platform to share stories and their feelings, and I think that’s a positive that has come out of that.”

Sampson was born in Laurinburg, North Carolina, in 1955. It was an era in which discrimination was still rampant across the country, but especially in the South, and nearly a decade before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the The Civil Rights Act of 1964. The things Sampson saw as a child came flooding back when he saw the video from Minneapolis.

“To me, he might as well have had a pillowcase over his head with his eyes dotted out and his nose dotted out,” Sampson said. “It just brought back memories of the Ku Klux Klan from the ‘50s and ‘60s.”

Sampson said the look on the face of Officer Derek Chauvin, who has since been charged with 2nd-degree murder, gave him the

impression that “he was enjoying what he was doing. It almost brought you to tears.”

It did bring tears to the eyes of longtime basketball coach Ernie Kent, who remembered being stuck in the back of a police car as a 9-year- old and driven around the block so that a white woman could tell an officer whether he had stolen her purse.

Kent was heartened, though, when he spent Thursday night at a march in Oregon.

“Ninety- five percent of them were white and young,” said Kent, who played for Oregon and later coached 13 seasons in Eugene. “And they were carrying ‘ Black Lives Matter’ signs, ‘ Protect our Freedom,’ and all these things were coming out of them, and I just sat and watched for an hour from afar.”