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Breaking New Ground

By E.J. Crawford

A football lifer, Norries Wilson was searching for a head coaching position. With the Columbia University Lions, he has become a pioneer.

Two weeks after his landmark hiring as the Columbia football coach, Norries Wilson’s office in the Dodge Fitness Center is barren.

There are no diplomas, pictures or even a calendar on the white walls. Wilson still doesn’t know how to access his e-mail messages, which he thinks is best because it would prove a distraction. He has yet to leave campus, which he admits he cannot even blame on the late December Transit strike.

“People here talk about the strike,” Wilson says, shrugging, “but it doesn’t affect me. I’m here until 10 o’clock every night.”

Wilson is an immense figure, a former two-year starter as an offensive lineman at the University of Minnesota who towers over the other coaches in his office and whose hand swallows a reporter’s whole. He dresses in plain khaki pants, with a light blue short-sleeve shirt and a maroon tie. The shirt, struggling to stay tucked in, reveals that Wilson is decidedly out of place in the nation’s fashion capital.

Wilson is, quite simply, a football man. It also just so happens that, as of Dec. 12, 2005, when Columbia tabbed him to be its head football coach, he is the first black head coach in the 50-year history of Ivy League football.

“The situation at Columbia is a milestone,” says Floyd Keith, the executive director of the Black Coaches Association and a former football coach at Rhode Island. “Unfortunately, today it draws attention because of the lack of. We would like to think that in the future we won’t have a discussion about this.”

Wilson agrees, but is more sanguine in his response.

“Some say you never want to be the first to do anything,” he says, “but I don’t have an issue with it. I’m honored to have that place in history, be it as it may.”

Despite its paucity of black football coaches, the Ivy League has a sturdy reputation for its minority hiring practices and boasts a surprisingly rich history for African-American contributions to football.

Each of the eight League universities has had a black head coach for men’s basketball, and in the last two years Cornell has earned an ‘A’ and Dartmouth a ‘B’ from the Black Coaches Association (BCA) in regard to their searches for head coaches.

Historically, Brown’s Fritz Pollard — the first African-American to coach a professional football team — was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 20005, and the Ivy had the first black player to receive All-America honors (Harvard’s William Henry Lewis), the first African American to coach an integrated team (Dartmouth’s Matthew Washington Bullock, at UMass, 1903) and the first black athlete to play a Division I football game below the Mason-Dixon line (Harvard’s Chet Pierce, 1947).

But the League, like many in the country, has lagged behind in the hiring of minority candidates for football.

A 2003-04 study by Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found that that 44.3 percent of Division I football players were black, but, currently, only five of 117 Division I-A programs have black head coaches. And apart from the historically black colleges such as Grambling, Southern and Mississippi Valley State, the only black head coaches at the Division I-AA level are Wilson and Indiana State’s Lou West, who coached Wilson at Minnesota.

“I understand I have a great responsibility to be successful here so other [black] coaches will have an opportunity to be head coaches,” Wilson says.

Already, however, Wilson has helped advance the cause for equality. According to Keith, only three schools in Division I — again excusing the historically black colleges — have black head coaches in both football and basketball: University of Washington, Buffalo and, now, Columbia.

“I think it speaks volumes for the kind of school that this is,” says third-year Columbia basketball coach Joe Jones, who was active in recruiting Wilson to the Upper West Side. “I think it’s one of the most diverse school you’ll ever find, and not just for African-Americans. It’s an extraordinary place.”

Wilson certainly hopes so, having passed on other opportunities in the past. Massachusetts offered Wilson its head coaching job following the 2003 season, but Wilson chose to remain as the offensive coordinator at Connecticut out of respect for the student-athletes he coached during the Huskies’ transition from a Division I-AA program to I-A, as well as for the program’s impending inclusion in the Big East.

The following season, in 2004, UConn went 8-4 and defeated Toledo in the Motor City Bowl. Wilson directed an attack that boasted the top-ranked scoring offense in the Big East.

He did not receive a single call regarding head coaching positions that offseason.

“Past performance does not indicate future results,” Wilson says. “You can be the offensive coordinator at Tennessee and that doesn’t guarantee you’ll get a head coaching job. They’re few and far between and they open and close faster than you know.”

Both Wilson and Columbia Athletic Director M. Dianne Murphy say there was no magic formula to Wilson’s hiring by Columbia. He did not grow up dreaming of coaching in the Ivy League, nor does he have an Ivy League background or any previous affiliation with Columbia.

For Wilson, Columbia is simply the right place at the right time, an opportunity he did not want to let slip away. And for Murphy, he was quite simply the right fit for the job.

“We weren’t focused on (race),” Murphy says. “We were clearly focused on hiring a leader and an outstanding person. We felt like he had tremendous leadership capabilities and had great success at every program he’s been in.”

Adds Jones: “Everyone says the same thing: ‘You can’t say a bad thing about him, he’s just a very fine person.’ And that’s the most important thing here, we’ve added another fine person.”

Wilson well understands the impact of his hire, but that is not his focus. Columbia has not finished above .500 since 1996 and has just two winning campaigns in the last 34 years. Wilson knows he has much bigger challenges ahead.

“I’m aware of it, but it’s not like I wake up in the morning and worry if I slip up,” Wilson says of his status at the Ivy’s first black head football coach. “It is what it is. I’m not out carrying a banner on my way to work saying, ‘I’m the first black coach in the history of the Ivy League.’

“But I want to make Columbia a good football program. Not because I’m a black football coach, because I’m a football coach. That’s the most important thing for me right now.”
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