When Damon Evans was applying to become the University of Georgia’s athletic director in 2004, he was met with a lot of discouragement.
“You shouldn’t be applying for this job at this time,” he remembers people saying. Their tone was underlined with a sentiment that the SEC wasn’t ready for its first African American athletic director. Then after earning the job, he received lots of hate mail with racial slurs.
Evans, now at the University of Maryland as one of 14 African American athletic directors across the FBS, expected to see more progress in minority hiring across collegiate athletics all these years later.