As I wrote in my last article, thank you for reading. I am grateful to share my ideas and that some of them resonate with the lacrosse community. I am mostly grateful that those who are reading have been so respectful of my perspective. And as I’ve thought about what to share next and what may be helpful, I echo what I wrote previously: I am OK if you agree, disagree or have questions. I just invite you to read and interpret in a way that makes sense for your experience while being respectful and mindful of mine.

Now, what next?

The opportunities have been created. The genuine, authentic invitations have been offered and accepted. Now what? You have people of color in your space (coaches and/or players). What should you do? First, reflect on your thinking. Second, ask them. Third, do your best to make the environment safe to be in. Though I cannot speak for anyone else except for me, I can offer ideas and suggestions. But the person in front of you is going to be the expert on themselves — not me.

Now, back to the first part — your thinking.

“…The deepest need of the human heart is to be understood. Everyone wants to be respected and valued for who they are — a unique, one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-cloned (at least for now) individual. People won’t expose their soft centers unless they feel genuine love and understanding. Once they feel it, however, they will tell you more than you may want to hear.”

— Sean Covey, “7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens”

I first encountered this quote when I was teaching a leadership class to high school seniors in California a few years ago. While the focus of the section (Habit 5) is on genuine communication, the part that always stuck out to me is “the deepest need of the human heart is to be understood.”

To understand ourselves and others often takes great humility. We need to examine our upbringing, biases, values, morals, thoughts, actions and ethics to get to a place of genuine understanding. A quote from an unknown author helps to embody this: “Before I can walk in another’s shoes, I must first remove my own.” In other words, there are things that we each need to unpack before we can get to places of empathy and trying to understand others. This comes with varying degrees of challenge but is worth it when we get to a genuine place of understanding with one another.

One of those challenges, I propose, is deficit thinking. Deficit thinking, more often discussed in education research circles, revolves around the notions (unspoken and spoken) that certain groups of individuals have the inability to do certain things based on their socioeconomic differences. Usually, the assumptions further perpetuate oppressive systems while blaming the groups with socioeconomic differences for not being able to “power through” to be successful.

As Dr. Donna Y. Ford put it in a recent presentation about gifted education as part of the “Black Minds Matter” series, “The less we know about others, the more we make up. And that is the vicious cycle of deficit thinking.”

The need for understanding becomes even more critical given that we are prone to make things up about others the less we know about them. Think about tabloids and celebrity gossip. So much is assumed from a picture or an interaction when in reality, we have no clue what is happening since we don’t know them. Our guesses and speculation may happen to be correct at times, but most of the gossip headlines are made up simply because we do not know about the people being pictured.

Given that we are in a sport community, I find it fitting to refer to “Remember the Titans,” the popular movie from 2000 based on the true story of coach Herman Boone’s attempts to integrate a football team. There are two scenes in particular that I want to point out: the lunch scene when Boone declares they need to get to know one another and the diner scene when Sunshine misunderstands racism as a relic of the past.

While so much can be unpacked from the entire movie in addition to those two scenes, I chose these with a purpose. In the lunch scene, the teams are sitting by race and are unwilling to sit together. Boone (played by Denzel Washington) tasks them with getting to know a different teammate each day and holds the players accountable by making them submit daily reports. In doing so, Boone is working on his team’s culture, knowing that race as well as that the players are coming from different schools are factors in them sitting separately.

This scene is a reflection of the need to truly get to know one another beyond practices and competitions. Even though sport is a reason we may gather, there is so much more to each person than the sport they participate in. The Titans become more familiar with each other’s personal lives outside of school as the movie progresses, as exemplified by Gerry and Julius getting to know each other’s families.

In the diner scene, Sunshine, due to being from California and having a different upbringing, doesn’t fully understand the culture of racism in Virginia despite Petey’s subtle attempt to explain it to him. Although this misstep occurs and Petey is rightfully upset by the situation, this does not create a permanent rift in the team. Not much is shown beyond this scene in terms of what happened next, but it goes to show that missteps and misunderstandings — race-based or not, intentional or unintentional — will happen.

While it may not be as drastic or as explicit as the diner scene, this still happens in other ways. Like any movie based on a true story, those scenes are scripted and may not have happened in real life. (Several articles have detailed that the true story of this team’s tensions had more to do with schools merging and players competing for limited spots than racism.) However, there are still lessons to be learned from movies, books and other media about understanding one another and the impact of deficit thinking.

Even still, there are some real-life challenges in the sports industry that will take acknowledgement, understanding and anti-deficit thinking to help us continue to move forward. For example, did you know that from 1933-46, Black men were not allowed to be quarterbacks in the NFL? This was based on deficit thinking, the perception that while physically evolved, Black men weren’t intellectually evolved enough to play certain positions. It mirrored the beliefs of the Jim Crow South that Black people were inferior. This thinking went as far as the creation of an “unwritten” policy that was enforced in the NFL.

Although that type of deficit thinking was banned decades ago, the systems that perpetuated this thinking laid the foundations for many sports. While there are Black quarterbacks in the NFL today, the progress still comes with missteps and the need to adjust the systems in place. We must continue to actively and proactively combat deficit thinking (even from the past) because it can (and does) take the form of implicit biases that linger in sports and other aspects of society.

There are many layers to thinking and many ways to get to personal reflection and humility —all with the purpose of understanding self, others and the world. When we do the work to get through the layers, we can be in spaces together to have honest conversations where we ask things like, “What do you need? What will make you feel safe? What are some things I’ve missed that you have noticed?” Having time and genuine moments to build relationships goes a long way, especially when we make space to learn about the person in front of us, for the other person to be themselves and to allow the interactions with the person to fill in gaps instead of making up our own information. When all of this is in place, we satisfy the need of the heart to feel understood, we work on anti-deficit thinking and we create spaces that are as safe as possible to be our full selves with all our identities (race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.).

And when I write “as safe as possible,” I mean this: It is not just enough for people to have a safe space. They need to be able to safely stay in the space. Safe spaces aren’t so much about preventing every harm — that’s not possible. Safe spaces are about being able to feel confident, supported and able to share experiences as your full self.

Unfortunately, a reality of the lacrosse community is that Black players still face harmful situations like being called the N-word and other racial slurs. While this may not seem like a “big deal” or seems to just be “a thing of the past,” it is still a present-day issue.

Imagine being that player who is called a racial slur during a game.

Imagine being a coach who is addressed more aggressively or brushed off, but seeing a coach of a different ethnicity being greeted warmly and respectfully by the same person during their respective first encounters.

Imagine sharing that experience and not receiving support or accountability for what happened. Instances like these are sometimes why people will leave the sport altogether. Accountability to situations like this takes different forms. Sometimes, it equates to removing individuals from leagues or programs so that those remaining can feel safe. Sometimes, accountability can look like what Jeremy Ardrey of Nation United shared in the US Lacrosse webinar, “How to Advocate for Inclusion as Part of Your Child’s Lacrosse Experience,” about making an unfortunate situation a learning opportunity for everyone. It can also look like Dr. Miles Harrison speaking to Kyle Harrison’s earlier coaches about the disparity in his playing time.

Regardless of what form it takes, the theme is the same: Actions must be taken to try to make a space as safe as possible. If something occurs, accountability (in whichever form) is necessary. To that end, US Lacrosse has adopted an anti-harassment and discrimination policy that includes recommended steps for leagues, events and lacrosse organizations to follow when there are violations of the policy.

At the end of the day, these are the things that I personally want:

• To be understood

• To be met with human dignity and anti-deficit thinking

• To feel safe in a space to express myself.

To be in a space with me mostly means acknowledging that I am a Black Woman — without extra aggression/assertiveness when addressing me, without changing how you act as a form of cultural appropriation to “level with me,” and by understanding the dynamics of being a Black Woman in America.

Sharing a space is more than just sharing the same ideals. It’s about seeing me as a person and treating me with respect. For me, that involves avoiding colorblindness, learning about biases, communicating respectfully and showing humility. We could have completely different ethnicities, political beliefs, ideals and upbringing. But I would hope that we could still be in the same space without fear or threat (conscious or subconscious).

I know that missteps can happen due to learning, re-learning and un-learning. I know that successes can come from having authentic relationships and understanding the people we share spaces with. I know that people (me included) are trying. I understand the importance of asking those in the space what they want, and I hope that you, the reader, does, too.

Since we know being understood fills a basic need, my challenge to you is this: What will you do next to make people of color know they are understood and belong in the lacrosse community?

Lauren Davenport is the manager of athlete development at US Lacrosse. She has coached lacrosse at the youth, high school and collegiate levels.