By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
September 25, 2026
Now we know.
Neither Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith nor Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita likes the job he has. Each would prefer to be doing something else.
Beckwith wants to be the worst coach in the WNBA.
He made that clear a few weeks back when he weighed in on Indiana Fever Coach Stephanie White’s reaction to a hard foul in a game. Beckwith sputtered that White should have been fired for not “defending” her players.
In doing so, he angered Fever fans and managed to convince anyone with the basketball IQ of a gnat or better that he understood absolutely nothing about the game. If Hoosier native and hoops legend John Wooden merits the nickname “the Wizard of Westwood”—and Wooden did deserve that—then Beckwith has earned the monicker “the Knot head of Noblesville.”
Even the weakest, most underachieving team in the WNBA can look at their coach, however ineffective she or he might be, and then look at Micah Beckwith and think, “well, we definitely could do worse. A lot worse.”
Rokita has different aspirations.
He wants to be a high school athletic director somewhere.
That’s the real message behind the lawsuit Rokita just filed against the Indiana High School Athletic Association.
Rokita’s nonsense suit takes the IHSAA to task for a longstanding rule requiring that two of its 19 board members be “qualified minorities,” which means those two slots must be filled by someone who is not a white male or white female.
Ponder that for a moment.
Rokita, who is whiter than Caspar the Friendly Ghost, thinks that no one darker than he is should have a guaranteed seat at the table when it comes time to make rules and policies for high school sports in Indiana.
Two of 19 seats on amounts to 10.5% of the IHSAA board’s membership. Indiana has a non-white population—depending upon how one defines “white”—that is anywhere from 19% to 25% of the state’s total population.
So, if anything, the IHSAA’s rule requiring two minorities at the table shorts the state’s non-white citizens two to four seats that should be theirs.
Our attorney general doesn’t seem to be concerned about that injustice or inequality at all. He doesn’t seem to care one bit that the concerns of up to one-quarter of the state’s high school athletes won’t be represented at all at the IHSAA if he gets his way.
That’s not surprising.
Let’s focus for a moment on what Rokita’s and Beckwith’s fixations on sports have in common.
Beckwith went cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs because a black player delivered a hard foul to a white Fever player on a breakaway fast-break layup. He wanted the Fever’s coach to scream bloody murder and stir up animosity toward the black player—and he kept pounding that drum even after the Fever’s players, including the one who was on the receiving end of the foul, said they supported their coach and thought she’d responded appropriately to the situation.
There are a lot of hard fouls in the WNBA—and in basketball in general, for that.
What was it about this one that set our lieutenant governor off?
Then there’s Rokita.
There are any number of issues that could demand the attention of the attorney general—and the taxpayer dollars at his disposal.
But our attorney general has decided that one of his priorities—one way he spends his time and our money—should be to deny this state’s minority citizens any guarantee that they even can be underrepresented in deciding how the state’s high school students should play sports.
He says such a system is unfair to white students.
Hmm.
What do these two situations have in common—other than revealing that Micah Beckwith and Todd Rokita aspire to do jobs they’d perform even worse in than the ones they currently hold?
The answer to that question may be just as black and white as a referee’s jersey.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Also, the views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
