For four years, Courtnie Williamson, a graduate back on UNC’s field hockey team, was the sole Black athlete among her teammates.
“I really felt a sense of being alone, a little bit of isolation,” Williamson said.
For most of her college career, she felt as if there wasn’t a space for her to discuss race and other social issues or express her feelings as a Black athlete on a majority-white team.
“The athlete community feels like a real small school in a sense, and spending so much time being a part of that and less time, because of it, being a part of the huge Carolina community, you feel the lack of diversity,” Williamson said.
But when Williamson started regularly meeting with other UNC athletes of color over Zoom, she realized that she wasn't alone in her feelings. The group that hosts these meetings, the BIPOC Student-Athlete Collective, aims to provide a space for athletes like Williamson to share their experiences.
The collective started back in May 2020 as protests over the police killing of George Floyd started to boil over across the country. Associate athletic director Cricket Lane, with the help of Williamson, decided to bring together UNC’s Black athletes so they could discuss their emotions during the turbulent time.
“These were all of our Black student-athletes, just to provide them a place to talk, to process what was going on,” Lane said. “I think there was obviously heightened sensitivity everywhere, so it just made sense for us to come together.”
The meetings have continued through the 2020-2021 school year and expanded to include all athletes of color, partially in response to the increased awareness of anti-Asian hate. While the group still hosts its regular discussion-based meetings, they’ve also looked for ways to turn their words into action.
“Our first meeting was quite long,” Lane said. “It was probably close to two hours of just talking, then our subsequent meetings were, ‘OK, now what are we going to do?’”
