It seems those who have a say in Division I-A athletic personnel matters--athletic directors, booster club leaders--haven't heard the news. There are plenty of qualified Black football and basketball coaches ready to step up and report to work. Out of 117 Division I-A football programs, there are currently three Black head coaches. The number hardly matches the nearly 50 percent of Black players who hit the field each year. Dr. Robert W. Ethridge, vice president for equal opportunity programs at Emory University in Atlanta and president of the American Association for Affirmative Action, says people look at the hiring practices in coaching to be special situations where favoritism plays a big part in the process because they are unique. In sports, he says, some coaches choose to bring in their assistants because they have a working knowledge of the coach's philosophies and behaviors. "They start to identify people they want to bring in, people that know them," Ethridge says. "Quite often, those are not Black coaches. It's something similar in medicine and science. You recruit with major funding, but the requirement is that the researcher will want to bring his own research assistants with him. The argument is if the researcher can't bring his own team, he'd have to start over." Floyd Keith, executive director of the Black Coaches Association, based in Indianapolis says, "It's a very complex issue." Keith, along with Dr. Keith, along with Dr. Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports at the University of Central Florida, says hiring Blacks for the top head-coaching jobs should not be a problem. "Call it by any name. It's an injustice," Keith says.