Baseball scholarships becoming elusive for Black HS grads

CHAD HARDY (OF/RHP) is a talented athlete and student.
6'-0/175 lbs., 60 times: 6.65
Batting Average: .459, Fielding %: .958, On-Base %: .560, Stolen bases: 28
PROSPER HIGH SCHOOL/ GRADUATES IN 2015'
2014/15 Team Record: 26-3/District: 13-0
HOMETOWN: MCKINNEY, TEXAS
SUMMER TEAM: DBAT Mustangs (3-years)
Honors: Named to all-district team for 2013-14 season
Lead team in hits, runs scored and stolen bases
Signed NLI: Paris Junior College, Paris, Texas
Courtesy: PERFECT GAME

NORTH DALLAS, Texas -- A typical young, black male in football and basketball glides down a gilded pathway by the time they are seniors in high school in both of those sports. My brother Chet, a blue chip, Parade All American as a senior, had bags of letters from every major university in the nation when he was a senior at Carter High School. You know this story well as you see it play out every year across high schools in Texas: Notre Dame, USC, UCLA, Florida State, Oklahoma, Michigan, Alabama, Miami, Ohio State, Texas, LSU, Nebraska; they all came calling on gifted young black males to help transform or maintain their programs.

Indeed, this is the accustomed stance for young black men: the decision where to lay their roots at many of the nation’s finest colleges and universities. In Chet’s case, all these same schools beckoned him to sign with their program, not only because of his football skills, but his academics were through the roof as well. Those programs that were recruiting Chet obviously know talent, as Chet, years later landed in the Texas Black Sports Hall of Fame, the Texas A&M Hall of Fame, and earning two Super Bowl rings from his time as an All-Madden Safety with the San Francisco 49ers.

Well, I see Hardy as a modern-day version of Chet, but with a major variant in play. He resides in a sport that appears conflicted at all levels (youth, college and pro) about how much leeway to give a young, black baseball player.

In Hardy’s case, he may have arrived before his time in a collegiate sense. It doesn’t appear that deserving kids like Hardy – for all of their merits on and off the field – will be able to entice the “gatekeepers” at college baseball’s highest levels to “pull a Bear Bryant,” where Bryant, in the early 70s, decided all-white football squads were passé. Bryant helped lead Alabama out of the dark ages, taking the entire college landscape (SMU, USC are among the enlightened programs that had previously diversified their squads) with him as his move to black ballplayers finally ushered in widespread acceptance on most campuses and thus allowed blacks to finally compete with the nation’s best and on the best teams in the nation.

Though Hardy has the talent to allow him to play for virtually any school in the nation, he has fruitlessly performed in front of schools like Louisiana Tech University, the University of Arkansas-Little Rock and Stephen F. Austin. For some reason, those schools and others aren’t biting.

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