CHANGE IS COMING

Carmen Maciariello watched the video of the death of George Floyd and saw the Black Lives Matter protests that followed and wanted to be part of the change.

The Siena men’s basketball coach did just that - with a little help from his coaching friends - creating Coaches 4 Change, an interactive website that ‘engages, educates, empowers and evolves’ student-athletes on issues such as social injustice, systemic racism, voting and so much more.

“I wanted to do something to help and to raise awareness and to educate our  student-athletes,” said Maciariello, whose team was 20-10 in his first season as head coach and won the regular-season MAAC title before the conference tournament was postponed because of the coronavirus. “It started as me just reaching out to my old coach, Louis Orr at Georgetown, and (assistant coach) Gerry McNamara at Syracuse, (assistant coach) Mike Mennenga at Oregon, (head coach) Amir Abdur-Rahim at Kennesaw State; just different guys that I have come across and respected. I just wanted to have conversations about how they were tackling this and what they were doing with their teams and how they were helping take care of their players. 

"And it kind of just grew … and it was something that I took the initiative on and said, ‘Let's make a website; what can we do, what can we tackle and accomplish' and that is how the voting piece came about because there were so many things that we wanted to do. We can have this platform and … we can use this for a vehicle of change and … no matter what the cause is we always want to be able to engage people, then we want to educate them, then we want to empower them to make change and then we want to evolve and grow from it.”

The website talks about the “privilege barrier,” details different types of racism, profiles famous black athletes who were agents of change, racial inequality and voting, with the goal of “100 percent student-athlete voter participation at every college across the country.” There are currently 43 coaches signed on to Coaches 4 Change, with the goal of having between 100-120 participants, including many from the women’s game. Maciariello added the initiative is not exclusive to basketball.

“(The website) is going to be a resource that is going to be around for a long time,” Maciariello said. “There’s educational pieces on there, books, movies, documentaries, podcasts. There’s a way to register to vote, your absentee ballot, all that stuff. We want to make it a place to go to not only register to vote, but then get lost in learning.”

Maciariello has kept in contact with his team since the school shut down because of COVID-19 followed by the murder of Floyd, the subsequent protests and the calls to end systemic racism in this country. He said this season Siena will add all-black alternate uniforms to “draw awareness to social injustice.” 

“As a white man from upstate New York, I wanted to let my team know that I have their backs and I loved them and I was there for them,” he said. “But there is no way to fathom all they have gone through and all the different things they have had to deal with as black men with all these issues.

“I am a head coach now, and I always wanted to have the biggest impact I could, and as an assistant your impact is limited, you work for somebody else and it’s not your program.  But being the head coach at Siena … it’s just such an honor to be able to be an agent of change and to help grow our young people and to help educate them and that’s for me the most important thing.” 

Maciariello sees limitless possibilities for the website, but it all starts with the power of the vote.

"You don’t want (social injustice and the protest movements) to get swept under the rug. This is something that needs to be around and talked about and it needs to be rectified,” he said. “Who knows how long that takes but it starts at that ballot box.”

To visit the website, head to www.coaches4change.org.