The DMV (Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia) region has seen its recent fair share of African-American coaches reach the coveted NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament. Randy Monroe guided UMBC to its first “Big Dance” in school history in 2009, Morgan State’s Todd Bozeman pulled off the same feat in 2010 and John Thompson III has kept Georgetown University as an annual tourney contender since his arrival in 2004.
Now there’s another name to add to the bunch as Virginia Commonwealth University men’s basketball head coach Skaka Smart recently led his team on a tournament run that will never be forgotten.
The VCU Rams are just the third No. 11 seed to advance to the Final Four round of the tourney, thanks in large part to the guidance of 33-year-old coach Smart, who has been compared by some to President Barack Obama.
While Obama convinced a nation to vote for change, coach Smart has been able to encourage his team to prove naysayers wrong with a successful run in this year’s tournament. Most college basketball pundits argued that VCU didn’t even deserve a tournament bid, but with Smart’s motivation and tactics, the Rams not only won five straight games against powerhouse programs, but also averaged a double-digit lead for each victory.
But the Obama comparisons don’t stop with just leadership skills. Like the president, Smart comes from a biracial background. His father is a native of Trinidad, while his mother, a Caucasian, is from Wisconsin. Raised by his mom alone, Smart joked with reporters that the only thing his father did give him was his first name, Shaka, in honor of legendary tribal chief Shaka Zulu.
“Shaka was a warrior, he was a tough dude, and my dad chose to name me after him,” Smart told Yahoo Sports. “You may have seen the movie Shaka Zulu? That’s who I’m named after.”
Smart was accepted to study at both Harvard and Yale, but chose to attend Kenyon College, where he became the school’s all-time leader in assists with 542. Upon graduating from Kenyon, he took work as an assistant basketball coach for California University of Pennsylvania, where he also earned his master’s in social science. He went on to serve as an assistant coach for Dayton, Akron, Clemson and Florida before taking over as VCU’s head coach in 2009. Now, he’s just one game away from becoming the youngest coach in NCAA history to appear in the national title game. But Shaka isn’t dwelling on the media hype.
“It is what it is,” he told reporters. “… After the hype, it will just be life again with a little bit less attention.”
