U Sports basketball tournament highlighting Black women in coaching coming to Toronto

A unique collegiate basketball tournament is coming to Toronto to encourage more Black, Indigenous and racialized women to get into coaching.

The Athlete Women Empowered Classic, a four-team U Sports women's basketball tournament, will be held at York University from Oct. 20 to 22. York, Concordia, Trinity Western, and the University of Toronto are all competing in the event that will also have workshops, panel discussions and networking sessions with coaches, athletes, and industry leaders.

Those four teams are participating because their coaches are the only Black women currently leading women's basketball teams in U Sports. U of T's Tamara Tatham, Concordia's Tenicha Gittens, Trinity Western's Cheryl Jean-Paul and York's Christa Eniojukan designed the pre-season tournament during the heaviest periods of the COVID-19 pandemic to create a pathway for BIPOC women to take on leadership roles in sports.

"We each have different journeys of how we came into coaching, we each have different experiences within the university context, and all of us are involved in a national team program of some kind," said Jean-Paul. "So it's just really breaking down barriers and helping, especially young Black female athletes, recognize that there are opportunities for them after their playing career."

Jean-Paul said that she wishes an event like this existed when she was first breaking into the coaching ranks.

"You can't be what you can't see," she said in a recent phone interview with The Canadian Press. "I think I'm the oldest of the four of us [...] and when I was coaching at the high school level or in a club or I was coaching at the CEGEP level I wasn't sure if someone like me could make that the university level.

Eniojukan said she