It’s early December and ‘tis the season for college recruiters to lay their football mack all the way down. 

The NCAA early signing period, when many high school athletes commit to where they’ll play at the next level, ends today, and it’ll soon be followed by a contact period. That’s when college coaches and staff can reach out directly to athletes and their families urging, cajoling, perhaps even promising riches to young prospects, trying to convince them to bring their ball-playing talents to their college or university.

And to win at that game, recruiters often single one person out for concentrated attention: Black mothers.

It’s a tacitly understood feature of student-athlete recruitment that’s crucial to the process but rarely acknowledged, studied or celebrated publicly. While the role of every mom in recruitment decisions is intuitively important, it’s Black mothers specifically who the entire game of football might just hinge on, said Tracie Canada, whose book Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football has a chapter that examines the centrality of Black mothers to the sport.

“I think plenty of people write about coaches. I think plenty of people write about fathers. I think plenty of people write about the men that surround football because that is the expectation,” said Canada, a professor of cultural anthropology, gender and sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University.

“And so I also think that it is important to say that it is not only men that are allowing this sport to continue. Mothers not only give bodies to the sport, they’re giving birth to these players. They are also caring for them in a way that is different from the other people around them.”

Black mothers perform a type of specialized labor when it comes to their football-playing sons, giving them outsized influence on decisions about football and life. That labor involves care and kinship around “their holistic lives rather than just their lives as football players,” Canada said. It includes helping them navigate a world beyond the football field in large Black and brown bodies that are often reflexively feared and historically politicized.

Upwards of 40 percent of all NCAA college football players are Black, so the numbers alone make Black women at least partial gatekeepers of the sport. And from concerns about CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) to NIL (name, image, and likeness) to the backlashes over DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), Black moms are taking notes.

For the third installment of our Recruiting While Black series, Canada spoke with Andscape about the centrality of Black mothers in football recruitment and their broader impact on the sport. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In Tackling the Everyday, you’ve said your chapter on Black mothers has really found an audience and resonated deeply with people. Talk about what led you to that chapter and that line of inquiry. 

The fact that this is the chapter in my book that people ask me about the most, to me, is a sign I’m picking up on something that people are so aware of, but they don’t often see it. It’s not in literature. It’s not usually given space. I’m specifically interested in Black football players, and the players themselves are consistently referencing their moms, when there’s no reason to talk about them. This is referencing how outsized they are in their lives, just how big these figures are to them in the decisions that they’re making in their daily behaviors, in their interactions with people around them, and it has always been clear to me that mothers are an important part of this story.

Because I’m a Black woman anthropologist, and an ethnographer doing this work, and because I am a Black feminist, I’m attuned to particular relationships. I’m attuned thinking about Black women and how their care and kinship align in a particular space, and these aren’t usually the analytics that we think about in football.

So in what specific or outsized ways did you notice that care showing up?

If you go to a football game, you can always tell whose kid belongs to who because the moms are very loud, they’re supportive of their son in a particular way, even if they’re supportive of the entire team. There might be a nickname that they yell out. They might be saying, “That’s my son!” They’re the ones that are wearing the T-shirts that might have his face on it, that might have his number on it. They bring the signs, they have the cowbells in college. They’re the ones who organize who’s going to the game this week. They’re the ones doing that labor.

Then as I’m spending time with these Black players, their moms were always brought up, and this was not something that I was asking about. There were players who called their mom every day. There was a player who was super proud that his mom bought all of his clothes because she knew what he liked to wear, but also knew where she could shop for him, given his size. In my book, the chapter title, “The Year My Mom Was Born,” came from an offhand comment that somebody made about his jersey number making him feel close to his mom. So I’m seeing this physical presence in their son’s lives alongside a constant reference from players.

The other thing that I think is relevant is that people assume that the players I was spending time with were from single-parent homes. These are mothers who have been married for a long time, often to the fathers of their children and I always have to say, “These are not single moms that have to do everything on their own.” These sons have very present fathers in their lives, too. But I was noticing there’s a different relationship that comes from moms of football players than fathers of football players. Fathers seemed to be very invested in the football player himself — of how well he did, of how he can improve, of what’s physically going on during a game. Players will often reference their dads as the reason that they started playing in the first place.

The relationship to football often comes through their dads, but I think that they are sustained by their moms. The moms are the ones who are doing a certain type of labor so that the player feels supported. And the moms also seem to be invested in them as people. There’s something in how they are asking about their holistic lives rather than just their lives as football players.

I think that that’s important across the board. But the reason why the focus is specifically on Black moms is because demographically Black players are overrepresented in football. Especially if we look at a college campus versus a college football team, Black men are severely overrepresented. So for a lot of these guys, the women that are around are going to be Black women.

You referenced the quote,”If 10 percent of mothers in this country would begin to perceive football as a dangerous sport, that is the end of football,” attributed to an unnamed NFL doctor in response to the work of Dr. Bennet Omalu (a forensic pathologist whose discovery of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy caused wholesale changes in concussion protocols).

How should we think of that quote in terms of the ways Black women guide and care for their football-playing sons?

The way that I write about it, if I’m taking that quote seriously, is that if moms didn’t buy into the sport, the sport would go away. So that means Black women are playing a significant and really important role here. 

There are the ones who say, “I will not allow my son to play at this school, to play for this coach, to be in this division if I don’t feel OK with where he is. Even if he wants to. If I don’t feel it, you cannot go there. I will not allow that to happen.” And I think that these moms recognize something about how important it is that these are young Black men who live in particular bodies. It’s a body that’s usually big and strong, visibly so, in a way that is transgressive and is often outside of the norm. And so these moms are also [thinking]: My son is in danger on this field, but my son is also in danger in the real world outside of it because of the body that he lives in, given this anti-Black world that we exist in.

The way that I analyze it is that moms are the ones that clock all of these angles for their Black sons in a way that doesn’t seem to be taken into account as obviously by other people. 

Have football programs, institutions and administrations responded to or shown that they recognize the role of mothers and Black mothers, specifically? And if so, what are some examples of that?

I remember one of the first, very early on conversations I had with one of the coaches. It was camp time, the semester hadn’t started yet, and one of the things he said was about how they recruit moms, and how if they recruit a player, the mom can be a great spokesperson for the program. She can attract other moms to get on board, and they can use networks of moms to attract players.

At the time I was doing research, all of these NFL safety clinics were also happening, and these were different NFL teams inviting moms of young players. Not college, high school and lower. It wasn’t a parents’ clinic, it wasn’t even just an NFL clinic, it was specifically the NFL Moms Safety Clinic. What happens in football, but probably across sports, is that the professional league is making certain decisions and things usually trickle down to the lower levels. The NFL affects college, which is going to affect high school, which is going to affect Pee Wee, so I thought it was really interesting that the NFL was specifically marketing to moms and kind of putting its brand name behind the importance of this particular group of people.

These weren’t small events. For the two that I went to, you’ve got like 200 moms there and most of them are Black women.

So my question is, with all the structural changes going on in college football, like NIL and divisive political issues facing the nation, do you think we’ll see a significant recruiting impact from Black mothers’ advice and influence and if so, when?

Sports as an arena is notorious for attempting to claim that it is not political. Fans come from all different backgrounds and all different walks of life, but they come together to support a team. The assumption is the same for the players and the coaches. It’s this idea that the team, and what we’re doing here, is the most important thing right now, and we don’t care about all the other stuff that’s going on. That the playing field is completely divorced from the real world outside of it. As I’m sure you can tell, I don’t agree with that. I’m someone who talks about how race actually matters in this space.

One part of me would say 2025 is actually not all that different because these concerns have always been there for Black people. We are seeing things that are familiar because these things happen over and over again. What does it mean to walk through the world in a particular body? What does it mean to be an athlete who is stereotyped as someone who is only useful for what their body can do. These things are happening now, but they have also happened before, and will probably happen in the future.

If you’re talking about recruiting, what I imagine might be going on in this particular moment is probably part of the conversation that families are having. When you’re playing the sport of football, there is always calculus, an algorithm that is not specified, but there are a lot of factors at play here and how am I going to make the best educated, safe, hope-for-success decision, right? Football is already a dangerous sport, so part of the risk assessment is like should I play or should I not? What is my risk if I do it and what is my risk if I don’t? Do I play in this state? Do I play for this coach? Do I push for this position?

Part of that conversation could be that this state as a whole is doing X, Y, and Z [politically], but I have a good chance of going pro if I’m with this coach, at this university, with these other people there. Or it might be that because of the state that this university is located in, is it actually riskier for me to be there because of who I am, and because my options outside of sport are much more limited?

I’m very curious about how this moment is going to play out over the next five years, given everything that has happened politically, socially, culturally in this country in the past five years. The landscape of college sports has changed dramatically in the last five years when coaches and institutions thought it was important to take [performative] stands on issues. Taking a stand is always a recruiting and retention tactic to convince players to stay, to convince players to come.

What are Black mothers talking about in terms of their sons’ safety, on and off the field, and how do you think the impact of these conversations will be felt, especially on the rosters of schools in states where college football is most revered?

I’m spending time with high school moms right now, so it is interesting to see that what they are saying is not much different than all the things college moms had top of mind. It is about injuries. It’s about is my kid going to be taken care of? It’s about what kind of man is that coach and what kind of man is he going to encourage my son to be, right?

Black mothers are still going to be central to those decisions. Black moms are still paying attention. They’re taking notes. They are remembering these offhand comments that were made. They’re watching the news. They’re aware, but they’re also aware of what’s happening at their kids’ high school. They’re aware of what’s happening at the colleges that they’re looking at. They’re aware of what’s happening with the coaches at both of these places and what’s happening in the states where these schools are located, and how far away their kids are going to be away from them. These dynamics are always being taken into account by moms as they’re supporting their sons as they make these decisions about their future.