Produced by: redstormsports.com
January 14, 2019
St. John's welcomed distinguished scholar and well known activist Dr. Richard E. Lapchick on Friday afternoon for a seminar on "The Power of Sports and the Compelling Need for Diversity and Inclusion."
Dr. Lapchick, the Chair of the DeVos Sports Business Management Program at The University of Central Florida and the son of legendary St. John's men's basketball coach Richard Lapchick, addressed a crowd inside Marillac Auditorium on the Queens campus.
He spoke on a variety of subjects spanning a wide array of interests, focusing not just on modern athletics but on several of the social and economic ills plaguing our society today.
"Why do I stay in the world of sport and use sport? Because we have something in this world that I think nobody else has," said Lapchick.
"We call it the miracle of the huddle and once you get in that huddle, I can't give any other place in this country where it suddenly doesn't matter if you're African American, white, Latino, Asian American, Native American or Arab American, it doesn't matter if you're a Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, Sikh, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, young or old, gay or straight, come from a rich family or a poor family, the team can't possibly win if you don't pull together as a team. Imagine if we take that spirit of the huddle and put it in the rest of our institutions of higher education, corporate America, faith-based America. Pick the sector and put it in it and it's going to be a different world."
Lapchick serves as the Director of The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports (TIDES), which was launched by the DeVos Program in 2002 under his leadership. TIDES publishes the Racial and Gender Report Card (RGRC), an annual study Lapchick created in the late 1980s that measures the racial and gender hiring practices of major professional sports, collegiate athletics and the sports media in the United States.
Lapchick also helped form the National Consortium for Academics and Sport (NCAS) in 1985, which was recently renamed the Institute for Sport and Social Justice (ISSJ). The ISSJ is a group of over 280 colleges and universities that created the first of its kind degree completion and community service programs.
Lapchick has received nine honorary degrees and has been celebrated for his work by numerous national organizations. Among the notable recognitions, Lapchick was named the NCAA's Champion of Diversity in 2017.