To the players who called her “Coach B,” Beulah Osueke was more than just a coach.
Some looked at her as a parent. Others, as an older sister. Sometimes she was their financier. Often she was their disciplinarian.
Osueke, 35, was whoever the girls basketball players at West Catholic Prep, a high school in Philadelphia, needed her to be — an experience that opened her eyes to their world of hardships.
Coaching helped her understand “the magnitude of injustice and how it manifests so early,” Osueke said, “and how it thwarts people’s — particularly Black people’s — opportunity to reach whatever dreams they had.”
Throughout her eight-year tenure, Osueke built the West Catholic Lady Burrs into a championship-winning program, securing six district titles and winning the school’s first basketball state title in 2021. But teaching teenage Black girls their worth and how to respond to discrimination is what she considers her biggest victory.
Osueke’s outreach shows how sports can be a grassroots tool for empowerment and teaching life lessons, said Ketra Armstrong, sport management professor and director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity in Sport at the University of Michigan.
That’s more important now than ever, Armstrong said, as President Donald Trump’s wide-ranging executive orders dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs put in place to create equal opportunities for marginalized groups — leaving the future of education, sports and job opportunities in America uncertain.
“We can’t rely on the systems because many of the systems, they’re being cut,” Armstrong said. “Meaning the resources are being removed. But, you know, we have what we need to win.”
“We need a revolution of Beulahs. We need community activists in every corner,” she said. “That’s what it’s going to take.”
Building a foundation for success
When Osueke got the coaching job at West Catholic in 2013, she began creating a culture of structure and discipline, which she immediately noticed was lacking.
“Initially I’m like, ‘Oh, these kids have bad attitudes, I’ve got to break them,’” said Osueke, who grew up in a middle-class Black family in the Houston suburbs. “But when I started building relationships with them … I empathized with them.”