Iowa defensive line coach Kelvin Bell says he’s done ‘playing it safe’

Mike Hlas
IOWA CITY — On a Friday evening in June 2020, former Iowa football player James Daniels spoke up.
A week after video footage was uploaded to Facebook showing a white Minneapolis police officer effectively murdering a Black man named George Floyd by pressing a knee into Floyd’s neck, pain and anger continued to be released nationwide.
Daniels, an established NFL offensive lineman, had been a quiet public figure at Iowa, one who took his academics and athletics seriously.
“There are too many racial disparities in the Iowa football program. Black players have been treated unfairly for far too long,” Daniels tweeted.
Twitter
Other former Black Hawkeye players immediately responded in agreement, with their own criticisms and concerns about their college team.
Ten days later, the university reached a separation agreement with 21-year Iowa football strength and conditioning coach Chris Doyle. Within two months, an external investigation of the football program stated “In sum, the program’s rules perpetuated racial or cultural biases and diminished the value of cultural diversity.”
“When Iowa football burned on Twitter, I cried so much,” said Hawkeyes defensive line coach Kelvin Bell, a Black man. “It wasn’t just me, it was lots of coaches.
“To see all that toothpaste being out of the tube on a national level, that really stung. But it also opened my eyes to things. People talk about being woke. It was an awakening for me. And when you finally wake up, you’ll never see things the same again.”
Bell said he stopped assuming his players knew how he felt.
“I had my opinions,” he said, “but I never shared them with anybody because I wanted to keep football football.
“But I learned that football is just the game. The reason those kids play so hard for you is because they connect with you. And you build relationships and you build trust through vulnerable situations and conversations. And I never had those.
“They didn’t know where I stood. They had no idea.
“As a Black man, they looked at me like ‘How did you let that happen?’ And that’s a very good question. … I was caught in the middle of where there's smoke, there's fire, but then there's also the standpoint of self preservation.”
Bell said he didn’t witness the things the former players described, but didn’t doubt their accounts. He called Daniels “one of the finest and most upstanding young men that comes through your program. If he says something, it’s probably going to carry a little bit of weight. And I’m glad he did it.”
Bell said he felt his players “smacked me right between the eyes with my lack of action, my lack of voicing.” So he stopped keeping football football.
“What I don’t want,” he said, “is for young men Black or white to leave this place after four years bigger, faster and stronger but just as ignorant on racial and social issues as they were when they got here from high school. That is a failure. I really believe that.
“If you think your players are all about football all the time, you’re really missing the mark. They have cellphones. They have the news in their hands. They’re up on current events and they want to talk about them.
“More importantly, they’re ‘Hey, you coach. Hey, you mentor. Hey, you leader. I want to know how you feel about these things.’
“Whenever there’s an absence of communication, negativity will creep in. If you never talk about those things, you never let kids understand where you stand on certain topics, they’re going to assume the worst. That’s human nature.”
Bell said he feels Iowa’s coaches had “an honest self-evaluation, asking the tough questions of ourselves, having the hard conversations with ourselves, and just really tearing down a lot of the things that had been built.”
One area addressed, he said, was what certain words and phrases meant to players.
“The one thing that we got rid of was ‘The Iowa Way.’ What does that even mean? What does it mean to fit into our football program? Our football program is like a hard-nosed, blue-collar, no-frills, workmanlike place. That’s who we are. I did not mention race in any of those descriptors.
“But hardworking does not mean Midwestern white. Blue-collar does not mean factory-working or farming. We’re describing human beings you can find all over the United States.”
“Tough, smart and physical” has long been a team mantra.
“I remember this from an exercise we did over at Gerdin (Athletic Learning Center),” Bell said. ‘It was like when you think of a white football player, what words come to mind, and it was a group of Black players that said ‘Tough, smart and physical.’
“Whenever you can take ‘tough, smart and physical’ and people can start to assume you’re talking about white players, there is a serious void in communication.
“I don’t ever want you to think when I say ‘tough, smart, physical,’ I’m talking about Cooper DeJean, Josey Jewell, Anthony Nelson. Who are all smart and tough and physical players. But you should also add Desmond King to that lot, too. You should add LeShun Daniels, James Daniels.”
Iowa is 24-11 since the summer of 2020. Black recruits have kept joining the program.
“We didn’t see the product on the field diminish,” said Bell. “In some areas, it got better. If you look at what we’ve done defensively since 2020? We were good before, but the last three years we’ve been really good.
“I think it’s because our players feel more comfortable not just within the scheme, but being themselves. So now they have a really good chance to own Saturday, really go out there and let it all out because they know we have confidence in them, we accept them for whatever they are.”
⧉ Related Article: Resiliency not just a concept for Iowa defensive line coach Kelvin Bell
For three years, Bell has kneeled beside Black Hawkeye players during the national anthem before games.
“I support Colin Kaepernick and that protest. That kneel is to just bring an awareness that, hey, this injustice, especially to Black and brown people, is still happening.
“We are kneeling for George Floyd. We are kneeling for Breonna Taylor. We’re kneeling for any Black or brown person that’s been wrongfully incarcerated, brutalized by the police. That’s still going on.
“The first reason I kneel is because players knee. If no player kneeled, I would not kneel. I do not want them to feel alone.
“I played it safe. I’m done playing it safe.”
Twitter