HBCU-basketball

When Nora Beck, BC ’83, was a student at Barnard, she was a force to be reckoned with on the basketball court. The three-year captain won the respect of her teammates and the attention of women’s basketball fans across the nation, becoming the second All-American the program had ever seen. The 1983 MVP’s number, 32, was retired upon her graduation that year, and now hangs in the Columbia Athletics Hall of Fame.

Mike Smith, CC ’20, a former star for the Lions who transferred to the University of Michigan last year, has announced that he will enter the NBA Draft. Smith was a key contributor to the Wolverines, who earned a spot in the Elite Eight in the NCAA March Madness tournament this year before being knocked out by UCLA.

When Kenny Blakeney joined Jim Engles’ staff in 2018, he was trying to satisfy “an itch.”

As a child, junior swimmer Clare Larsen loved to play sports. Despite her passion, however, she always thought of sports as a boys’ world, and the male-dominated culture initially discouraged her from chasing her dreams of Division I recruitment. The message from people around her, Larsen said, was that “sports are healthy for a young woman, but [they’re] not necessarily something that you pursue.”

Colin Kaepernick famously took a knee against police brutality in 2016. The #MeToo movement reached the sports world in 2018 and exposed repulsive misconduct in many spheres. After the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police in 2020, strikes and civic engagement from almost all corners of the sports world, especially the WNBA, swept the nation. In short, modern activism in sports is at an unprecedented level, professor Frank Guridy said at the start of Monday’s Athlete Activism webinar.

During the height of racial injustice protests across the country last September, a group of Columbia student-athletes decided to form the Columbia Black Student-Athlete Alliance. The BSAA aims to provide a space for members to come together, reach out to the community, and educate their peers about the challenges they face as Black student-athletes.

When Jean Bain got the call, he was sitting on a couch in his Morningside Heights apartment, unwinding after a Saturday afternoon basketball practice.

March 7 was the last time the Columbia men’s basketball team took the floor. That night, now over eight months ago, rival University of Pennsylvania thrashed the Lions in Philadelphia 85-65, wrapping up a devastating 6-24 campaign that saw Columbia finish at the very bottom of the Ancient Eight.

The buzzer calls the end of the matchup, but that was never necessary. The game could have been over at minute 14. The Columbia men’s basketball team has just lost its 11th consecutive game (with two more losses to follow) and I am accidentally spilling my nonalcoholic beer on the lacquered hardwood of the Jonathan D. Schiller Court of Levien Gymnasium in the Dodge Fitness Center. The imitation brew is all over my skirt, which was an impractical garment for sitting on the seats of the press box to begin with. The rub between my tights and the vinyl is uncomfortable, not painful, but it is a distraction throughout the game. The stickiness of the beer makes the situation even less sexy.