Ken Jackson
Sports Writer

My dear friend from UCF, the honorable Richard Lapchick, the director of the school’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, would be pretty proud of humble ol' Osceola County these days.

Well, reasonably.

Right before I picked up the phone to talk to Dave Benson, a longtime assistant football coach at Gateway and Liberty, about him taking the Chargers head-coaching job, it dawned on me that he makes the third minority head coach of the county’s seven football programs.

Elsewhere, that’s not much of a deal. But, elsewhere doesn’t have our ranching background with the old-white-guy lineage that goes with it.

And the best part of it all is that I didn’t need Lapchick to remind me. But, then again, I almost glossed right over it without thinking.

This is not a bad thing.

Maybe we’re reaching a point – finally – when Donovan McNabb is no longer a “black quarterback” and guys like Benson, Poinciana’s Michael Timpson and Gateway’s Marlin Roberts are just football coaches.

Maybe we’ve finally realized that ethnicity has nothing to do with competency and that we’re now of a generation that goes to the game and enjoys the action on the field without really giving a care about who the coach is.

Benson said he doesn’t feel the need to carry any sort of banners for minorities in power positions.

“If we’re thinking of it that way, then it just shows we’re still fighting that,” he said.

With that said, how about we now worry about what happens on the field, and forget that I even mentioned it.

But, for one thumbs up, we also have a thumbs down on diversity. With Shanel Davidson no longer the girls basketball coach at St. Cloud, none of the county’s girls basketball coaches are  female.

Aside from volleyball, which is only played by girls in Osceola County, girls basketball is the one sport where women make the most in-roads into coaching.

Don’t get me wrong here, all I’m doing is mentioning fact and not wagging fingers at any athletic directors or principals. I’m not all that intimate with the number of qualified female coaches who have applied for openings.

Plus, this could be cyclical, because about fours years ago, the county had four female head coaches. Osceola’s Renee Bellamy led Osceola to four straight district titles and a Class 6A Final Four appearance, and Amanda Hall took Harmony to the regional playoffs in 2006.

All I’m saying is ... I’m just sayin’ ...

... Sorry to dip you into the apparent boredom of baseball (hey, get along or move along, the Celtics-Lakers series won’t go on forever), but the recent retirement of Ken Griffey, Jr. saddens me.

It’s partly because I remember his rookie year and he played forever, so that officially makes me some brand of old. But, on the other hand, look at the guy, especially when he was in his prime.

He stood 6-foot-2 and 225 pounds, ran like a gazelle and had a lefty swing  that was often imitated and rarely duplicated. It launched over 600 homers.

What makes an ol’ baseball softy like me sad is that most athletes with Griffey’s  skills today aren’t playing baseball. Now, they are shooting guards at Duke, Kentucky or Kansas, or  receivers and safeties at Alabama, Oklahoma or USC.

I’ve even read that Griffey Jr.’s 15-year-old son, Trey, prefers football and plays on a youth-league team that includes the son of former Cincinnati Reds great Barry Larkin.

Oh well, sign of the times I suppose. Time to get along or move along ...

... If the prospect of the upcoming World Cup doesn’t excite you, how about watching the World Cup in 3-D?

Kissimmee’s Buffalo Wild Wings will open early for all of the 10 a.m. games  and will do some 7 a.m. games based on demand. The USA-Great Britain showdown is this afternoon. Twenty-five games will be shown in 3-D on the new ESPN3D network.