E

ven though there weren’t high expectations when Tina Sloan Green was hired to coach the Temple women’s lacrosse team in 1974, she felt plenty of pressure.

Sloan Green was the first African-American head coach in college women’s lacrosse.

“When you’re the first, everybody looks at you,” said Sloan Green. “If you mess up, that’s the end for everybody. It added pressure to make sure that I did an outstanding job.”

Temple won one game in her first season, but Sloan Green worked hard to mine for talented players to build up the program, and the results began to come. Sloan Green coached the Owls to three national titles — the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women in 1982 and then NCAA titles in 1984 and 1988. Temple also made the finals in 1983 and 1987. The Owls were 19-0 in their 1988 championship season.

“I’d go to all these meetings, and they’d just take us for granted,” Sloan Green said. “They’d say, ‘They’ll never do anything.’ They didn’t pay any attention to us. They ignored the possibilities of Temple. It fired me up inside. I wanted to show them they didn’t know who they were dealing with.”

Sloan Green went 207-62-4 in 18 seasons before retiring from coaching in 1992 and focusing on the Black Women in Sport Foundation that she co-founded. Her Temple lacrosse coaching career began while she was also coaching badminton in the winter and field hockey in the fall — on top of teaching six credits for the school.

“It was a lot of work for $11,000,” Sloan Green said. “I thought it was a great opportunity and I felt like I was coming back home. It was a lot of work, but if you’re passionate about what you’re doing, it can be challenging and fun.”

Sloan Green gave up badminton and field hockey by the end of 1979 and was able to focus more on lacrosse, a program that was club status when she took over. It grew with the addition of scholarships after Title IX’s enactment and her recruiting efforts. She started lacrosse camps to attract a more diverse pool of players, ones that couldn’t necessarily afford expensive camps. She went out to rural areas and relied on contacts built up over years of playing and coaching to recommend her clinics.

“It was challenging,” Sloan Green said. “But I think in the long run, we changed not only the atmosphere at Temple University but around the surrounding area and internationally.”

Being a trailblazer as a coach wasn’t the first or only pioneering done by Sloan Green. She was the first African-American to make the United States national field hockey team and also the first African-American woman to make the U.S. national women’s lacrosse team.

“I had no idea I would be playing on the international level,” Sloan Green said. “I commuted to school my first year. I was just having fun.”

She was still touring when she was coaching at Lincoln University, a historically black college outside Philadelphia. She coached cheerleading and basketball and started a women’s lacrosse team at Lincoln. When Lincoln president Marvin Wachman moved on to Temple and the Temple coaching positions opened, Sloan Green saw an opportunity. Coming to Temple brought the challenges on a larger level.

“Irregardless of all the stuff that happened, I had a support system that helped me tremendously,” said Sloan Green. “I also had a support system inside the university, but more importantly, I had one outside the university. I had established a lot of contacts with groups like the NAACP and all these groups in the community, churches. If there was anything detrimental to me or my mission — it wouldn’t be easy — and they’d back me up.”

She was also in her hometown, where her family still lived and where she and her husband would settle. They were there to support her when times were tough.

“It’s obvious that there is institutional racism all over the place,” Sloan Green said. “When we would travel, people would make assumptions that this other person is the coach. I’m a Philly girl. My parents didn’t go to college. I’m dark skinned. I talk like a Philly girl. I felt comfortable with myself. Fortunately, I grew up in an environment where my parents gave me a sense of values, and in the church. I felt good about me, who I was, and that carried me through.”

Sloan Green ran into hurdles in recruiting. Even with scholarships available to come play for her, she represented something different.

“Looking at some of the students that I recruited, some of their parents had never been involved with a black coach or black people,” Sloan Green said. “Coming to Temple was an experience for them. I was realistic about what I could do and what I couldn’t do. I always hired a coaching team that could relate to them. I always had a white staff to assist me. I have a quiet, soft spoken personality. I hired someone with a different personality, who liked defense. I’m not a defensive player. I liked the offense. I did a team approach to coaching and the same thing with administration.”

Sloan Green was intentional with her recruiting patterns. She brought in players from a wide range of backgrounds, but they were competitive.

“Some people don’t want to talk about diversity or difference,” she said. “If you’re going to be successful, you have to deal with it. Not everybody is going to like each other, but as long as you respect each other and you find somewhere that you fit in, you can do it. We had one of the most diverse teams in the country.”

Sloan Green used the field and the classroom in the same way. Her academic classes didn’t hide from race and differences. They centered around them, and she felt her students gain a better understanding of different viewpoints. She created a curriculum that helped foster a healthy environment for dialogue as a professor in Sport and Culture at Temple.

“I was hired on both sides, the academic side and athletic side, which was a blessing,” Sloan Green said. “A lot of people were trying to get away from it, but I think it helped. I was able to meet faculty members who were from different parts and women’s groups. That sustained me within Temple and within the community atmosphere.”

Following her coaching career, Sloan Green poured her energy into the Black Women in Sport Foundation, which she founded with Dr. Alpha Alexander, Dr. Nikki Franke, and Linda Greene, Esq., early in her Temple tenure.

“We would go to meetings and we would never see anyone that looked like us or dealt with our issues,” Sloan Green recalled. “One day I said, ‘I’m tired of this. We never see anyone that deals with our issues, and we have all these black children, black coaches in Philadelphia, so what can we do about this?’ Our first Black Women in Sport Foundation conference was actually a continuing education program. Bob LeHew ran the program for extended education, and we invited all the Philadelphia coaches and assistant coaches to a summer course, and we talked about these issues. We started the foundation around 1974-75. We formalized it in 1992-93.”

The foundation continues today with a stated mission “to increase the involvement of black women and girls in all aspects of sport, including athletics, coaching and administration,” and Sloan Green, at 75, remains active in it. The BWSF enrolls underserved girls and boys in athletic programs in Philadelphia and neighboring areas.

“I thought we wouldn’t need it by now,” Sloan Green said. “Now we need it more than ever. I’m looking at these teams in lacrosse and field hockey, and they’re not very diverse. It’s a lot because of the pay-to-play environment. Diversity is not only racial, but economic diversity.

“My whole thing is give people an opportunity. Pay-to-play is detrimental not only to the individuals who have been discriminated against, but detrimental to the sport because you’re not getting the best talent. If you give everybody an opportunity, you’re going to come out with the best talent. You need that heart to really be outstanding. You need that passion to win. Often it’s through struggle that people come in with that competitiveness.”

Opportunity means everything to Sloan Green. She feels fortunate about her path because of opportunities she was given. Her parents gave her a strong background in faith and self-belief growing up in Southwest Philadelphia. A teacher in her hometown school recommended that she go to Philadelphia High School for Girls, a magnet public school north of Temple, and she did after the family moved farther out of the city to Chichester. At Girls High, she started playing field hockey.

“I credit my teachers at Girls High for a lot of what I accomplished,” Sloan Green said. “I probably would have transferred to my neighborhood school if they’d not seen my potential because I didn’t see it. I’d never played organized sports.”

It wasn’t until her sophomore year at West Chester University — recommended to her by a Girls High teacher — that the new West Chester women’s lacrosse coach, Vonnie Gros, asked her to play. Sloan Green went on to be All-American and tour for the national teams in two sports in the midst of getting her masters in education from Temple.

“Back in the day, Vonnie was probably one of, if not the most renowned field hockey player in the world,” Sloan Green said. “So to be coached by her and tour with her and some of my classmates, it was a tremendous experience that connected me to people and also gave me a better insight of the game and gave me a better idea of institutionalized racism.”

Sloan Green was sometimes left out of events and activities at West Chester. The school never had more than two African-American recruits per year. She widened her social circle beyond her physical education major and her athletic teams, and she was always busy enough to find something to do. She continued to lean on her nearby family for support and respect.

“At times, you feel alone,” Sloan Green said.

It wasn’t until after graduation that she found role models that resembled her. She found a job as a physical education teacher at Unionville High School before moving back into the city to coach basketball at William Penn High School. There, and when she went on to Lincoln University, she finally found other black coaches and teachers. Sloan Green went on to inspire others when she moved to Temple, where she became a national pioneer and championship coach and educator. She is in the U.S. Lacrosse Hall of Fame as well as the Hall of Fame at West Chester and Temple.

“It’s amazing,” Sloan Green said. “I really truly give a lot of credit to the players and to our coaching staff because the bottom line is, you have to excel and have to win in both the sport and in the classroom as well. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to get to the final four, but it’s even more difficult to win a national championship. We won three of them.”