Lee County has the highest ever number of Black head football coaches. Collier County has none

Cape Coral coach Larry Gary had three words when he asked about the high percentage of Black head football coaches in Lee County this season.

“Thank you, God."

Gary was hired by Lehigh in 1994 as Lee County’s first Black head football coach 25 years after the schools were desegregated. Now 28 years since Gary became a trailblazer, nearly half of Lee County football programs are led by a Black man.

This year in Lee County among public, private, and charter schools, Black men hold 10 of the 21 head coaching positions on the gridiron, including at seven of 15 public schools. That's two more than last year overall and at public schools, marking the highest percentage and number of Black head coaches the county has employed for the second year in a row.

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The last two Black head coaches to leave their posts, Earnest Graham at ECS and Elgin Hicks at Island Coast, were replaced by fellow Black coaches, Mack Mitchell (led Oasis from 2018-20 before taking an assistant role at ECS) and Chris Burnett, respectively. After Gary, who previously coached Cape Coral from 2012-17, steps down at the end of this year, that trend will continue with Seahawks alum Isaac Harvin assuming duties for the 2023 season.

“It’s a blessing. A blessing in disguise,” Harvin said. “I was a freshman and sophomore at Cypress when coach Gary was the defensive coordinator over there, and it was like a dream come true to come back to Cape and be an assistant under his leadership. I’ve been following him for a long time.

“For the rest of the guys to get that opportunity to be a head coach, it just put the fire in me a little bit more. Why can’t I give it a shot? I’m loving it. I’m gonna keep pushing other minorities to have that chance. You never know until you reach out and try.”

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Collier County can’t say the same about hiring Black head coaches.

Among the 11 public and private schools in the county that offer 11-man football, there isn't a Black head coach, snapping a nine-year streak of at least one dating back to 2013. Five of the seven public schools have yet to hire a Black coach to lead their football program.

Immokalee and Lely are the only two public schools that have had a Black head coach. Darryl Bullock was Collier County’s first in 1995, where he coached Edgerrin James in one season leading Immokalee.

Collier County athletic director Mark Rosenbalm did not respond to requests for comment.

Collier County spokesman Chad Oliver said principals use a selection committee to choose candidates for football head coaching positions.

"The committee typically puts in rank order the best candidate for the position and provides that list to the principal who will then make the final decision and make the offer," Oliver wrote in an email.

"There are times when the school’s first choice does not accept the offer for reasons that may include timing, housing, etc."

Collier County has no representation

Immokalee grad Rodelin Anthony coached his alma mater from 2016-19. Anthony, an assistant principal at Immokalee Middle School, said Black representation in Collier County schools still feels slim and clustered to him, just like it was during his time from kindergarten through the end of high school.

“I think in the education realm in general if you look at the bigger picture, there’s not a lot of black representation in education, period,” Anthony said. “How many young kids can say they’ve had an African-American teacher? Through my K-12 experience, going to school in the '90s to the early 2000s, I can probably count on one hand the number of black teachers I had. In elementary I had none. In middle school I had none. It wasn’t until I got to high school where it was my coach, and he wasn’t necessarily my teacher.

“I maybe had three teachers that were African American. There’s a very small representation there. It feels like the same now, and nothing has changed.”

The numbers back Anthony.

Among the 3,045 teachers in the Collier County school district during the 2021-22 school year, 154 were Black (5.06%). That was an uptick from the 2020-21 school year, which had 144 Black teachers (4.66%) out of 3,093 positions. White representation ticked down from 87.04 percent (2,692 teachers) to 86.57 percent (2,639) from 2020-21 to 2021-22. Applicants for Collier County schools job have seen an uptick of white applicants from nearly 2,000 to 2,500 annually over the past five years while the Black applicant pool has remained steady at between 450 to 500 a year.

For comparison, Lee County started this school year with 434 Black teachers, which comes out to 7.9% while there are 4,345 white teachers in the district, which makes up 79% of the staff.

In the past four years, Collier County has had seven schools with openings — Golden Gate, Gulf Coast, Lely, Marco Island, Naples, Immokalee (twice), and Palmetto Ridge. Only Immokalee hired a Black coach in Johnny Smith who lasted two seasons before being let go and replaced last spring by Riverdale coach James Delgado.

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Anthony believes that there are some individuals in the certification process that are unable to become teachers because of a certification process that is viewed as lengthy and comprehensive.

"I guess the question is, are those guys being weeded out through the application process, through the certification process?" Anthony asked. "You know coaching doesn't pay the bills (head football coaches receive a $7,000 stipend). You've gotta teach. In Collier County, if you're going to coach, you have to teach. And if you go back to it all, there's not many African Americans in the classroom to begin with.

"Is it the certification process that's weeding them out? I don't know. Is it the lack of knowledge or experience? It might be. The certification process is hard. There's a lot that has to get done. That may weed out a few individuals, that most likely could be black."

The district has made it a point of emphasis to hire minority candidates, which may include coaches, into the district. As a part of a "Recruitment and Retention" presentation in May, the district expressed intent to go to events such as the SWFL Hispanic Career Fair, as well as schools with heavy minority populations in Florida A&M, Bethune-Cookman, Florida International, and Florida Memorial.

Replacing talent with talent

Lee County has had recent success in finding Black head coaches. Former Island Coast athletic director Michael Dubbelde hired two for the Gators before leaving to take over at Gateway High this fall.

Dubbelde hired Elgin Hicks in 2020 and Burnett, who was on Hicks' staff, in 2022 to lead the Gators program. Hicks was The News-Press Football Coach of the Year in 2020 after leading Island Coast to a 6-4 season and its first postseason appearance since 2014.

"Both Hicks and Burnett are somewhat local boys from Charlotte," Dubbelde said. "I think that is finally starting to come full circle, is local players are coming back to settle down, start families, and give back to what they love, and that was football. Hicks especially had a lot of experience at every level.

"He was able to pass that on to kids at Island Coast that he really could reach because his story matched a lot of theirs. It's kind of the same way with Burnett, playing high school and college football, and coming back to where it all started for him, and giving back to those kids on a lot of the same paths that he knows very, very well. It's something really cool to see in this area."

Unlike Gary, who brings decades of experience and is the oldest Southwest Florida coach at 66, Burnett is a first-time coach and at 29 just beat out fellow Black first-year East Lee coach Herbans Paul (a 30-year-old Immokalee alum) for being the area's youngest coach.

“I think I was a 1-year-old at the time,” Burnett said of Gary’s trailblazing moment in 1994. “I think it just shows the times we’re in. I think in every business, in every career setting, there’s that changing of the guard. It just shows what’s going on in the community. I’ve said this time and time again, don’t wait to get into coaching. Don’t wait till later. Now is the time to be a coach. The nice thing about me is that I’ve been coaching right out of college.

“… I think a lot of younger guys think they forgot about the benefits of coaching. Being able to see seven head coaches (in the Lee County School District) that are African American is huge.”

Much like Anthony when he was a student in Immokalee, Lehigh head coach James Chaney can also say the same about not having a Black coach until his late teens.

Chaney's first black coach wasn't at the Pop Warner level. It wasn't at North Fort Myers High School, either. It was during his time at Florida State from 1988 to 1992 when he got to experience that feeling of being able to learn from someone with the same skin color as him.

"Jimmy Heggins was my defensive line coach," Chaney said. "Him and our wide receivers coach, coach (John) Eason. They were the first two black coaches I've ever experienced. And then while I was playing Pop Warner with the Fort Myers Rebels, my dad was coaching on another level but I never had an African-American coach. To come from that time to now where its all across the state, the state of Florida has changed."

Showing times have indeed changed, North Fort Myers football star Bo Summersett has had nothing but Black head coaches in high school. During his stints at Oasis, Ida Baker, and North Fort Myers, he's had Mitchell, Chuck Faucette, and Dwayne Mack as head coaches. In his college career, the Florida A&M commit will most likely play under a Black head coach for the HBCU, starting with Willie Simmons. He also had a Black head coach during his eighth-grade year at Pop Warner.

"It's great," Summersett wrote in a text. "I feel like I can really be myself. It was good having them as coaches. It was just fun and real."

Follow Southwest Florida Sports Writer Alex Martin on Twitter: @NP_AlexMartin. For the best sports coverage in Southwest Florida, follow @newspresssports and @ndnprepzone on Instagram.

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Lee, Collier counties on opposite levels of Black head football coaches