Slats Gill - Legacy

Legacy

When he retired from coaching in 1964, Gill became the Oregon State athletic director, a position he held until his death from a stroke in 1966.

Gill was elected a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame. Oregon State's basketball arena, Gill Coliseum, is named for him.

Gill was the first OSU coach to have an African American player to play on the team. Norman Monroe was a walk on and was the first black basketball player to play at OSU and played for the team for half of the 1960-1961 season. The first recruited, scholarship black athlete to be named to the OSU basketball team arrived only in 1966, when Charlie White was named to the squad.

This policy of institutionalized racism in OSU athletics would come to a head in another of the school's major sports when in 1968 OSU football player Fred Milton would clash with Head Coach Dee Andros over grooming policy — a battle reduced to racial terms as a struggle of black athletes against white coaches and administrators. In the supercharged political climate of the decade, the so-called Milton Affair would lead to a protest march and a walk out of classes in sympathy and the mass departure of African-American athletes from the OSU football team. It would be several years until tensions abated and Oregon State sports could be called fully integrated.