There is an added sense of pride for Oree Banks, the former West Virginia State football coach who won this year's American Football Coaches Association Trailblazer Award. For one, it recognizes Banks' contributions as a coach at historically black colleges and universities. He served as head coach at both South Carolina State and WVSU.
It also is an award he helped create.
"It was a great honor," Banks said. "I felt that it was one of the key accomplishments in my life, making sure that these people are recognized."
Since 2004, the award has honored legends like Hampton's Charles Williams, the first African-American member of the AFCA, Florida A&M's Jake Gaither and Grambling State's Eddie Robinson. The seeds of the award were planted in 2001 and 2002, when Banks approached college football coaches, and then approached AFCA executive director Grant Teaff, about the need to recognize the contributions and achievements of HBCU coaches from 1920-80.
"I said, 'We're concerned,' " Banks said. "And they said, 'We understand.' "
Banks' proposal received overwhelming support, including from Michael Mullen, then the chancellor of the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission. A committee was formed and, soon thereafter, Williams was honored as the award's first recipient.
This year was Banks' time. He said he usually gets a phone call from the AFCA asking him about potential honorees. He started getting a little puzzled when that call had not yet come, but understood when he received word he was the 2016 award winner.
Born in Newton, Mississippi - and after a tour with the United States Army and a year at Indiana University - Banks played defensive end at Kansas State from 1956-58. He got his first head coaching job at Coahoma Community College in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1960. He then became an assistant at Grambling before becoming head coach at South Carolina State in 1965. He was an assistant at South Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin before taking the job at WVSU in 1977.
He was the Yellow Jackets' head coach until 1983. In his second season, he led State to its first winning record since 1969 and enjoyed four winning seasons in seven years. In 1983, he became the third African-American coach, following Gaither and Robinson, to be named to the AFCA board of trustees, and was inducted into the NAIA Hall of Fame in 1995 and into West Virginia State's athletic hall of fame in 2008.
"This is an honor befitting someone of Coach Banks' stature," WVSU President Anthony L. Jenkins said. "He is a legendary coach and the epitome of a trailblazer. What he has accomplished as a coach and educator clearly places him in a rare class."
Since his final season on the State sidelines in 1983, Banks has remained a professor at the university and deeply involved in the AFCA, advocating for universities to hire more African-American head coaches. Of 128 Football Bowl Subdivision programs, only 13 have African-American head coaches. That comes at a time when, according to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports, African-Americans accounted for 53.4 percent of all FBS student-athlete participants in the 2015 season.
That needs to get better, Banks said. And he said that can improve with younger African-American coaches dedicating themselves to working their way up the ladder, as well as African-American players taking the coaching route out of college rather than just solely focusing on a playing career.
"I say to them, 'You're going to have to take that no-paying job, work on your master's, but get on the staff as a graduate assistant,' " Banks said. "That's the key, and I think that will be coming forth soon. That gets you into the system."
In a decades-long career as coach, educator and advocate, Banks wants to continue the movement to not only improve the landscape for current African-American coaches, but to recognize the endeavors of those that came before them.
"I want people to understand there was a time we experienced that we have to grow from," Banks said. "Segregation was segregation back years ago, but we did not give up. We did not give up. We found ourselves moving ahead in trying to establish the fact that we needed to be a part of the system, and we couldn't be part of the system unless we were all together."
Contact Derek Redd at 304-348-1712 or derek.redd@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @derekredd.