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Billy McBride

Billy McBride

  • Title
    Associate Director of Athletics – Diversity, Equity & Inclusion / Director of Club Sports
  • Email
    btmcbride@amherst.edu
  • Phone
    413-542-7947

Billy McBride serves as the Associate Athletic Director for Diversity and Inclusion, the Director of Club Sports, and as a Senior Coach at Amherst College.

An active member of the community, McBride is also the department’s liaison to the Center for Community Engagement, Admission Office, Dean Office and Human Resources Office and served as a NESCAC conference Diversity Inclusion Equity Committee Member in 2021 and as Amherst’s Diversity & Inclusion representative to the NCAA in 2019.

Most recently, McBride has been invited by the Amherst College Admission Office to sit on two panels to address the guardians of those who have been recently accepted to the College.

COACHING
During his tenure at Amherst College, McBride has held several assistant coaching positions and was the head coach for women’s basketball for fifteen years – being named both the NESCAC and Northeast Region District 1 Coach of the Year in 2000-01. He has been actively involved with the NCAA while at Amherst and has served as a facilitator for student-athletes on behalf of the NCAA at the NCAA Division III Student-Athlete Leadership Conference in the cities of Pittsburgh, Pa.; Fort Worth, Texas; Chicago, Ill.; and Jersey City, N.J.
 
THE ARTS
Working closely with the Mead Art Museum and the American Art History Department throughout his tenure, McBride’s commitment to the arts has seen him travel to Spain to conduct research on famed painter Francisco Goya and lecture in American Art History first-year seminars at Amherst.
 
Advancing his interest in American realist painter George Bellows (1882-1925) into education, McBride has presented on 18 of Bellow’s pieces and, in conjunction with the Mead Art Museum, produced a podcast highlighting two of Bellows’ renowned lithographs. In 2015, he was invited to be a guest lecturer in the American Art History class "The City: New York," to speak on a series of Bellows’ prints set in boxing venues.
 
Described as “locating black history, culture, and experience as an integral part of the social fabric of “Americanness,” Amalia Amaki’s piece “Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue #15” that was donated to the Mead Art Museum is credited in honor of McBride, and McBride is also a published author with the Mead Art Museum College Collection Guide.

MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKING
Specializing in how athletes can use sports to combat discrimination and other social injustices and diversity and inclusion in higher education, McBride has been a sought-after motivational speaker in the region, traveling to various colleges, elementary and high schools, and consulting firms in western Massachusetts as an invited guest.
 
In 2012 and 2010, he served as a guest speaker at the Institute for Training & Development in Amherst and at SportsUnited, a division of the Bureau for Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State. His 2012 talk focused on building bridges through sports in Kosovo – a view supported by U.S. Embassy in Kosovo – while his 2010 lecture discussed combating racism through sports in the U.S. and in France.
 
Assisting the NCAA in a professional development endeavor in Atlanta, Ga. in 2014, McBride spoke on the topic of “Leadership” for the Division III Institute for Administrative Advancement and in 2019 McBride acted as the keynote speaker at the NCAA Accelerated Academic Success Program (New Orleans, La.) and at Berwick Academy’s Athlete Leadership Team’s First Annual Salt Summit.

COMMUNITY
McBride has worked with youth groups to promote higher education and with the elderly to endorse fitness and cognitive thinking. He was the Director for the City of New Haven’s (Conn.) Girls Basketball Camp for College Coaches working with inner city youth, and, in 2010, he received The Black Men of Greater Springfield Community Services Award for his work with the W.E. B. Du Bois Academy. 
 
He has served as the Nike Girl Basketball Camp Director at Amherst College for more than twenty years and, in 2004, he started the first Father & Daughter Basketball Camp in the country through U.S. sports camps out of San Francisco, Calif.
 
In 2017 McBride was featured in a national ad for Dove Men+ Care – “Thank Every Men Who Was There to Care” – in a special Father’s Day campaign, and in 2019 he was named a 100 Black Men of Massachusetts & Connecticut Black Tie Gala Award Honoree.
 
PRIOR TO AMHERST
McBride came to Amherst College from Allen Stevenson School, N.Y., where he served as the school’s Director of Athletics.

A 1979 graduate of Tennessee State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in recreation, McBride was a two-sport athlete; basketball and football. He was a member of Tennessee State’s 1975 NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four team and was drafted in the NFL by the San Francisco 49ers shortly after graduation, playing the majority of his professional football career in the CFL. He received his master’s degree in exercise sciences and sports studies from Smith College in 2006 and was inducted into the Greater Syracuse New York Sports Hall of Fame for Football and Basketball in 2016.
 
McBride is a 1974 graduate of Central Tech High School in Syracuse, N.Y., where he was named First Team All-City in football and basketball, and All-Upstate in football. He received the Omar Spencer, Outstanding High School Athletic Award and in 1972, was selected YMCA Youth of the Year.