Dismissed Richfield basketball coach defends program, says parents wanted 'institutional racism'

With the rampant open enrollment of the past decade, not just in Richfield but throughout Minnesota, kids who played in the community traveling leagues were getting displaced by students moving into districts.

“You’ve got a small group of traveling (basketball) parents that don’t consider themselves racists, but are pretty good people, yet they want a program of institutional racism,” said Dimick, who is a certified public accountant in Minneapolis. “Then you have a group that you can call closet racists that don’t want to see black kids wearing Richfield uniforms. It is a difficult issue. Nobody wants to talk about it.”

As an ex Richfield basketball player (backup center for 3 years!), this upsets me. Richfield has probably changed (for the better) more than any other city in the state over the last 15 years, going from a mostly white school, to one of the most diverse, with a strong population of Latino, African, and Black students, plus the mostly non-white kids that come to the school through open enrollment.

Nice to see a coach stand up for what is right, as long as he is doing what he thinks is a fair system for all.