For the players who called her “coach B”, Beulah Osueke was more than just a coach.
Some have looked at him as a parent. Others, as older sister. Sometimes she was their financier. Often she was their disciplinary.
OSUEKE, 35, who was the basketball players of West Catholic Prep, a high school in Philadelphia, needed it – an experience that opened their eyes to their world of difficulties.
The coach helped her understand “the extent of injustice and how she manifests herself so early,” said Osueke, “and how it thwarts people – especially blacks – the opportunity to reach the dreams they have made.”
Throughout its eight-year term, OSUEKE built the West Catholic Lady Burrs in a championship winning program, obtaining six district titles and winning the school basketball state title in 2021. But teaching black girls and how to respond to discrimination is what it considers its greatest victory.
Osueke awareness shows how Sports can be a basic tool for empowerment And teacher of life lessons, said Ketra Armstrong, professor of sports management and director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity in Sport at the University of Michigan.
It is more important than ever, said Armstrong, like President Donald Trump large -scale orders Dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs set up to create equal chances for marginalized groups – leaving the future of education,, sporty and uncertain America employment opportunities.
“We cannot count on systems because many systems are cut,” said Armstrong. “Which means that resources are deleted. But, you know, we have what we have to win.
“We need a Beulah revolution. We need community activists in every corner, “she said. “That’s what it will take.”
Build a base for success
When Osueke obtained the coach position in West Catholic in 2013, she began to create a culture of structure and discipline, which she immediately noticed.
“At the start, I say to myself:” Oh, these children have bad attitudes, I have to break them “,” said Osueke, who grew up in a middle -class middle family in the suburbs of Houston. “But when I started to establish relationships with them … I have sympathized with them.”
OSUEKE, who holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology, has seen her own preconceived concepts as a sign of a broader problem for black students, which are often confronted harder discipline disproportionately at school.
“I think that many people working with children in the city center, black children, do not give them the luxury of being considered human,” said Osueke.
Former hoop of the school and colleges, Osueke’s training was shaped by feeling that she had no defender when she faced university difficulties.
“It seemed extremely necessary to create a complete program,” said OSUEKE, “an environment that not only communicated to my young girls their value, but also showed them their potential because I realized that they were sailing on many obstacles and challenges in their personal life which would not allow them to optimize their performance in the field.”
She started with the bases: arriving in time training, following the dress code, behaving at home and in class. She held fundraising and designed team shirts for sale to go some of the girls’ sports costs.
After obtaining 0-18 his first season, West Catholic won five games the next day. The stars flourished under the direction of Osueke.
Tamiah Robinson, a principal goalkeeper at the University of Louisiana who played in West Catholic from 2017 to 2017, attributes to Osueke to have taught his responsibility. Whether by ensuring that she has accomplished apparently insignificant tasks such as tasks, Robinson said that Osueke had helped her grow “in a way I didn’t know I needed.”
“It has made a long way without my realizing it,” said Robinson, “that as a young woman, as a black woman, I have to manage what I have to manage first. And basketball arrives in second position.
This is what Armstrong of the University of Michigan called “the use of the power of sport” to raise.
OSUEKE “allowed her daughters to take the lessons they learned to be basketball winners, to be winners in the game of life,” said Armstrong.
Lead through tragedy
In 2016, one of Osueke’s stars athletes, Akyra Murray, 18, was the the youngest of 49 people Killed in the shooting of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, crushing both the coach and the team.
Osueke brought in a psychologist to help his players sail in their feelings.
Some were afraid. Some were angry – a player broke a window in the school gymnasium when the team met to discuss what happened.
A 15 -year -old student felt numb. She had experienced 10 deaths in the previous three months.
It was more tragedy that Osueke could not imagine suffering at this age, and that gave him a new perspective on what some of his players lived.
“Simply because I shared a gender identity and a racial identity with these girls, I did not know their whole world,” said Osueke.
She became more determined to help her players see what they could do. This included routine mental health checks and ensuring them in the way it could, including the purchase of grocery store for a player who had no food at home.
The most successful years of the team occurred after Osueke has gathered all these pieces.
They won 11 consecutive games in 2020 en route to a Catholic League championship in Philadelphia. OSUEKE was appointed coach of the 3A of the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association. Their class 3A state crown in 2021 was the first state of the school state, girls or boys.
Teach life lessons
Osueke pleaded for his players when they were not supported in school. She also fought so that they were arbitrated fairly when he seemed to face biased officials on the ground.
OSUEKE estimated that his team had an average of 10 to 15 more calls than their white counterparts, and they did not receive these same calls when their opponents scored, pinched and otherwise dirty.
Osueke told his players never to challenge the officials. She created training exercises in which she played the role of a referee who “thinks that the girls or the best resource inherited teams should win”.
If someone complained in practice, she made them run or make pumps, hoping that the approach would help them far beyond basketball.
“We have learned in practice to go through these things,” said Daja Hosendorf, who played for Osueke from 2016 to 2019. “She told us so that we can correlate how these things in games, how it is in correlation with the way our life would be.”
Hosendorf, who is now studying at the Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine in the island nation of the Caribbean of Saint Kitts and Nevis, uses this principle in its field.
“When I meet people who don’t see me as an equal,” she said, “I learned to pass in front.”
A broader impact
OSUEKE left full -time training in 2021 to have a wider community impact, even if it still forms players when it has time.
She is the executive director of Philadelphia of New Voices for Reproductive Justice and works on a project to help female basketball coaches to understand how the race, class and other factors can have an impact on student-athletes.
The advocacy continues to be among its greatest objectives.
“Sport is such a widespread presence. It is a universal infrastructure, ”said OSUEKE. “So we have to use it not only to score points or get money or get glory, but to transmit and plant seeds in the next generation of leaders.”