Richard Lapchick

Richard E. Lapchick is a human rights activist, pioneer for racial equality, internationally recognized expert on sports issues, scholar and author. He is the son of Joe Lapchick, the original Celtic center who became a coach for St. John's and the New York Knicks. Lapchick is married to Ann Pasnak, his second wife, by whom he has one daughter, Emily. By his first wife, Sandy Miller, he has two children and four grandchildren.

The early years

Lapchick’s life passion was sparked in Germany at the age of 14 while touring the Nazi internment camps of Dachau. Coincidentally, he was in Europe during the 1960 Summer Olympic Games and discovered the tremendous impact sport has to cross all lines, color, creed and religion. Thus, his dream to use sport as a vehicle for social change was born. It reinforced his early experiences witnessing public hostility toward his father when, as the Coach of the New York Knicks, he signed Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, the first African-American player signed in the NBA in 1950. His earliest memory as a five-year-old was seeing an image of his father swinging from a tree across the street from his house where people were picketing against the inclusion of a black athlete in a "white" team.

Activist work

In the 1970s, Lapchick started fighting apartheid and led the boycott of the South African participation in international sport events, the Davis Cup in particular. Lapchick was physically attacked in his college office in February 1978 just as it looked like the Davis Cup was going to be cancelled. He was attacked by men who proceeded to carve the N-word into his stomach. Lapchick worked for the United Nations from 1978-1984. His New York City apartment was ransacked in 1981 while he was leading a protest of a South African rugby team scheduled to play in the United States. His activism led to a personal invitation from Nelson Mandela upon his presidential inauguration in 1994 after anti-apartheid movements were successful.

Lapchick founded the Center for the Study of Sport in Society (CSSS) in 1984 at Northeastern University. He served as Director for 17 years and is now the Director Emeritus. The Center has attracted national attention to its pioneering efforts to ensure the education of athletes from junior high school through the professional ranks. The Center's Project TEAMWORK was called "America's most successful violence prevention program" by public opinion analyst Lou Harris. It won the Peter F. Drucker Foundation Award as the nation's most innovative non-profit program and was named by the Clinton administration as a model for violence prevention. In 1993, Lapchick co-founded the Mentors in Violence Prevention program, a gender violence prevention and education program which has been utilized by the U.S. military, professional, college and high school athletic teams. That year the Center also launched TEAMWORK-South Africa, a program designed to use sports to help improve race relations and help with sports development in post-apartheid South Africa. Partnering with the NBA, this trip marked the NBA's first visit to Africa.

One year after the Center’s inception, Lapchick wanted to take its mission national and established the National Consortium for Academics and Sports (NCAS). For 29 years, the NCAS has been "creating a better society by focusing on educational attainment and using the power and appeal of sport to positively affect social change." It is a group of over 280 colleges and universities that created the first of its kind degree completion and community service programs. To date, 33,913 athletes have returned to NCAS member schools. Over 14,985 have graduated. Nationally, the NCAS athletes have worked with more than 19.9 million students in the school outreach and community service program, which focus on four areas: teaching youth how to embrace diversity and inclusion, develop conflict resolution skills, prevent gender violence and avoid drug and alcohol abuse. They have collectively donated more than 22 million hours of service while member colleges have donated more than $300 million in tuition assistance.

In another diversity and inclusion initiative, the NCAS provides diversity management training to sports organizations, including athletic departments and professional leagues and teams. The Consortium has already conducted such training for the NBA, Major League Soccer, ESPN, NASCAR, and more than 80 university athletic departments.

Lapchick helped create the National Student-Athlete Day in 1988 which to date has recognized more than 2.6 million high school students for being citizen-scholar-student-athletes.

Lapchick was engaged by the NBA in 2014 to help construct the case for why continued ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers by Donald Sterling was determined to the NBA after his racist remarks became public.

Lapchick is active in work against human trafficking and has added Shut-Out Trafficking to the NCAS's effort to combat human trafficking with week-long programs on ten NCAS campuses in 2014-15. The program will engage student-athletes, coaches, and athletic administrators to help inform their campuses about this huge issue. It is partnered with the US Fund for UNICEF and the USOC Athletes Advisory Council and is funded by the Fetzer Institute.

Lapchick also consults with companies as an expert on both managing diversity and building community relations through service programs addressing the social needs of youth.

Academic career

Lapchick was an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Wesleyan College from 1970-1978 and a Senior Liaison Officer at the United Nations between 1978-1984. He then served as director at Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society for 17 years.

Lapchick accepted the endowed chair of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program at the University of Central Florida's College of Business Administration in 2001. The DeVos Program at UCF is a landmark program that focuses on the business skills necessary for graduates to conduct a successful career in the rapidly changing and dynamic sports industry. In following with Lapchick’s tradition of human rights activism, the curriculum includes courses with an emphasis on diversity, community service and philanthropy, sport and social issues and ethics in addition to UCF’s strong business curriculum. The DeVos Program has been named one of the nation’s top five programs by the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, the Sports Business Journal and ESPN The Magazine. In 2009 it was named the #1 MBA program in the nation for volunteer service. In 2014, Sport Business International named DeVos as one of the top three graduate sport business programs in the United States as well as one of the top five graduate sport business management programs internationally. During his time at DeVos, Lapchick became the only person named as "One of the 100 Most Powerful People in Sport" to head up a sport management program.

While at the University of Central Florida, he remains President of the National Consortium for Academics and Sports (NCAS) and has established The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) which serves as a comprehensive resource for issues related to gender and race in amateur, collegiate and professional sports.

He is the author of the internationally acclaimed Racial and Gender Report Card (RGRC) published by TIDES. It is an annual study of the racial and gender hiring practices of major professional sports, college sport, and the media in the United States. It shows long-term trends over a decade and highlights organizations that are notable for diversity in coaching and management staffs. TIDES also evaluates student-athlete graduation rates for all teams in college football bowl games, comparing graduation rates for football players to rates for overall student-athletes and including a break-down by race. The Institute also monitors some of the critical ethical issues in college and professional sport, including the potential for the exploitation of student-athletes, gambling, performance-enhancing drugs and violence in sport.

In December 2006, Lapchick, his wife Anne, daughter Emily, and a group of DeVos students formed the Hope for Stanley Foundation (HFS) which organizes groups of student-athletes and sports management students to go to New Orleans to work in the reconstruction efforts in the devastated Ninth Ward. As of the summer of 2014, Hope for Stanley members have spent 40 weeks rebuilding in the city. Lapchick was named an honorary citizen by the New Orleans City Council in October 2007. HFS has also worked with Tornado victims in Tuscaloosa, AL, and in New York with the victims of Hurricane Sandy.

Awards and accolades

Lapchick’s extensive list of honors and awards cover several decades. Lapchick received the "Hero Among Us Award" from the Boston Celtics in 1999 and was named as the Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez Fellow by the State of Michigan in 1998. He also won the 1997 Women's Sports Foundation President's Award for not working toward the development of women's sports. Lapchick won the Diversity Leadership Award at the 2003 Literacy Classic and the Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award from Tufts University in 2000. In 2003-04 he served as the national spokesperson for VERB, the Center for Disease Control's program to combat preteen obesity. He also won the Wendell Scott Pioneer Award in 2004.

In 2006, Lapchick was named both the Central Florida Public Citizen of the Year and the Florida Public Citizen of the Year by the National Association of Social Workers. Lapchick has been the recipient of numerous humanitarian awards and was inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame of the Commonwealth Nations in 1999 in the category of Humanitarian along with Arthur Ashe and Nelson Mandela and received the Ralph Bunche International Peace Award. He joined Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, Arthur Ashe and Wilma Rudolph in the Sport in Society Hall of Fame in 2004. He was also inducted into the Central Florida Sports Hall of Fame and the Multi-Ethnic Hall of Fame.

In 2008, he was given the NASCAR Diversity Award for leadership in advancing people of color in the motorsports industry. In 2009, the Rainbow/ PUSH Coalition and Rev. Jesse Jackson honored him for “lifetime achievement in working for civil rights.” Lifelong friend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar presented the award to Lapchick on behalf of Rev. Jackson.

In 2012, Lapchick was honored by the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida at its annual Dinner of Tribute. He also received the Champions Award from the Alliance of Women’s Coaches, the only male to receive the award in 2012. The Black Coaches Association presented Lapchick with their Distinguished Service Award which is only the 2nd time they presented this award in 28 years. Lapchick received the Mannie Jackson Human Spirit Award at the 2012 Basketball Hall of Fame enshrinement ceremonies.

In August 2013, he received the Pioneer Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. In 2014, the National Basketball Retired Players Association gave Lapchick, Bill Russell, and Pat Summit their Life Achievement Award.

He has been listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in American Education, Who's Who in Finance and Industry, and Who's Who in American Business. Lapchick was named one of the 100 Most Powerful People in Sports for six years, one of the 100 Most Influential Sports Educators in America, one of the 20 Most Influential People in College Sport and one of the 20 Most Influential People in Sport in Florida.

Lapchick was one of 200 guests personally invited by Nelson Mandela to his inauguration after leading the American sports boycott of South Africa from 1975 until the end of Apartheid. He also attended the funeral service for President Mandela in December 2013.

Education and publications

Lapchick received a B.A. from St. John's University in 1967 and an honorary degree in 2001. In 1993, he was named as the outstanding alumnus at the University of Denver where he got his Ph.D. in international race relations in 1973. He has received eight honorary degrees.

Lapchick is a prolific writer and is currently working on his 17th book. His literary works include: 100 Trailblazers: Great Women Athletes Who Opened Doors for Future Generations; 100 Pioneers: African-Americans Who Broke Color Barriers in Sport; 100 Heroes: People in Sports Who Make This a Better World; New Game Plan for College Sport; Smashing Barriers: Race and Sport in the New Millennium; Never Before, Never Again: The Stirring Autobiography of Eddie Robinson, the Winningest Coach in the History of College Football; Sport in Society: Equal Opportunity or Business as Usual?; Five Minutes to Midnight: Race and Sport in the 1990s; Rules of the Game: Ethics in College Sport; On the Mark: Putting the Student Back in Student-athlete; Fractured Focus: Sport as a Reflection of Society; Broken Promises: Racism in American Sports; Oppression and Resistance: The Struggle of Women in Southern Africa; Politics of Race and International Sport: The Case of South Africa.

Lapchick is a regular columnist for ESPN.com and The Sports Business Journal. He has written more than 550 articles and given almost 2,850 public speeches. He has spoken in the United States Congress, at the United Nations and in the European Parliament.

He is considered among the nation's experts on sport and social issues. Lapchick has appeared numerous times on Good Morning America, Face The Nation, The Today Show, ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, the CBS Evening News, CNN and ESPN as well as numerous other news broadcasts.