Floyd Keith, executive director of the Black Coaches and Administrators (BCA), will speak on diversity awareness and Anthony Holman, NCAA assistant director of championships and alliances, will speak on diversity initiatives in the ONU Sports Center on Thursday, Feb. 7, at 7:30 p.m.

The event, free and open to the public, is made possible through an NCAA grant for student athletes and is being held in conjunction with ONU’s celebration of Black History Month.

Keith, who graduated from ONU in 1970 and was inducted into ONU’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 2003, has accumulated 42 years of service and expertise in the sports profession, 23 of which have been in the capacity of high-level executive management. Keith is serving his 12th year as the executive director of the BCA.

During his tenure, the BCA has reinforced its position as the pre-eminent force for the social consciousness of ethnicity in American sports while increasing its membership from 172 to more than 5,500.

As the BCA’s executive director, Keith conducted an ongoing collaborative effort known as “Equity in Hiring” and coordinated annual “Equity in Hiring Summits” from 2002 to 2005. These national summits were dedicated to the resolution of the inequities in the hiring of candidates of color for head coaching and administrative athletic positions on the intercollegiate level.

The BCA’s “Hiring Report Card” is a direct result of these summits. 2011 marked the eighth year the BCA Hiring Report Card evaluated the hiring process of institutions of higher education in their searches for head football and women’s basketball coaches via a five-step grading system.

Keith is most proud of the development and realization of the NCAA-BCA “Achieving Coaching Excellence Program” (ACE) for collegiate basketball coaches. ACE is designed to advance the mission and vision of the advancement for ethnic minority basketball coaches to become head basketball coaches on the collegiate level. Keith has received national recognition on numerous occasions during his career.

In 2004, Sports Illustrated recognized him as one of “The 101 Most Influential Minorities in Sports.” Black Enterprise magazine listed him as one of the “50 Most Powerful Blacks in Sports” in 2005. The All-American Football Foundation honored him as the 2004 Executive Director of the Year.

Holman assumed his current position in June 2009 after stints in sales for Maloof Sports & Management, and he spent nine years as the assistant executive director of the Illinois High School Association. Holman is a Division III product, having played basketball at Augustana College in the early 1990s.