When I read this text the obvious attempts to damage Howard’s program were awful and stood out as another example of wrongdoing by the NCAA. Still, this quote stood out to me “While the NCAA had no complaints after this victory, it would continue to harass Howard University’s athletic and soccer program for the next decade, in the form of suspensions and other disciplinary actions. Nevertheless, Howard’s black team upset the racial hierarchy of American soccer during the 1970s and provided a precedent for the formation and articulation of black teamwork.” Reading through the text and finishing on that quote was really disheartening how an entire organization was harassing Howard over having a black team, and how they tried to ruin these teams with phony rules like the “foreign-student rule”. Today looking at the countless foreign players across multiple college sports here in the US, and even 10 years after the Howard soccer teams (like Patrick Ewing, Hakeem, and Dikembe Mutombo in basketball) who defined the sport they played puts into perspective the hurdles these Howard teams had to go through. The rules and treatment of the school were blatantly racist, and unfair to one of the best runs in NCAA Soccer’s history (that I know of) when they appeared in seven NCAA Tournaments in the 1970s. Today international athletes who come here to play collegiately receive much better treatment, but back then that was used to discredit a team of champions. Just because in the US we do not have a culture of kids playing professionally, does not mean that they should have targeted Howard, but that was not the real reason. It was very interesting to read about this harassment and how the team “Howard’s black teams created alternative spatial forms of justice that resisted antiblack practices and the coloniality of sport.” which was the most interesting to me and helped answer my questions about the harassment from the NCAA. It makes sense that an American institution would be afraid of change, especially involving race, and would do whatever it can to put down that change. It is all to common in the sports world, and what happened with this Howard team is a sad example. The NCAA should resinate the 1971 NCAA Championship to Howard.
