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.”
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.”
Osueke, who has a masters degree in clinical psychology, saw her own preconceived notions as a sign of a larger problem for Black students, who often face disproportionately harsher discipline in school.
“I think a lot of people that work with inner city kids, Black kids, don’t give them the luxury of being seen as human,” Osueke said.
A former high school and college hoops standout, Osueke’s coaching was shaped by feeling she didn’t have an advocate when she faced hardships in college.
“It felt extremely necessary for me to create a comprehensive program,” Osueke said, “an environment that not only communicated to my young girls their worth, but also showed them their potential because I realized that they were navigating a lot of barriers and challenges in their personal lives that would not allow them to optimize their performance on the court.”
She began with the basics: arrive at practice on time, follow the dress code, behave at home and in the classroom. She held fundraisers and designed team shirts to sell to go toward some of the girls’ athletic fees.
After going 0-18 her first season, West Catholic won five games the next. Stars blossomed under Osueke’s guidance.
Tamiah Robinson, a senior guard at the University of Louisiana who played at West Catholic from 2017-2020, credits Osueke with teaching her accountability. Whether making sure she completed seemingly insignificant tasks like chores, Robinson said Osueke helped her grow up “in ways that I never knew I needed.”
“It went a long way without me even realizing it,” Robinson said, “that as a young woman, as a Black woman, I need to handle what I need to handle first. And basketball comes second.”
That’s what University of Michigan’s Armstrong called “using the power of sport” to uplift.
Osueke “allowed her girls to take the lessons that they learned to be winners in basketball, to be winners in the game of life,” Armstrong said.
Leading through tragedy
In 2016, one of Osueke’s star athletes, 18-year-old Akyra Murray, was the youngest of 49 people killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, crushing both coach and team.
Osueke brought in a psychologist to help her players navigate their feelings.
Some were frightened. Some were angry — one player broke a window in the school’s gym when the team came together to discuss what happened.
One 15-year-old student felt numb. She had experienced 10 deaths in the previous three months.
It was more tragedy than Osueke could imagine suffering at that age, and it gave her a new perspective on what some of her players were living through.
“Just because I shared a gender identity and a racial identity with these girls, I did not know their whole world,” Osueke said.
She became more determined to help her players see what they could accomplish. That included routine mental health checks and providing for them in ways she could, including buying groceries for a player who didn’t have food at home.
The team’s most successful years came after Osueke put together all those pieces.
They won 11 straight games in 2020 enroute to a Philadelphia Catholic League championship. Osueke was named the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association Class 3A coach of the year. Their Class 3A state crown in 2021 was the school’s first state title ever, girls or boys.