After No. 6 seed Michigan reached the round of 16 of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament, an emotional reaction from U.S. forward Naz Hillmon offered a window into a season that has been well more than winning for the team.
“I have received many individual accolades, and they are always great. » Hillmon said. “But seeing the work my team has put in throughout the year and finally being recognized as a team is the best reward I could ever receive.”
As Hillmon spoke, she wore a T-shirt with a small circular patch near her left shoulder that said “BLM,” short for Black Lives Matter. “Right now, it’s more than just basketball,” Hillmon said. “More than being teammates, it’s being sisters.”
For the Wolverines, as with much of sports and other areas of American society, most of 2020 and the first part of 2021 were defined by the coronavirus pandemic and activism, particularly around racism.
Michigan’s 2020-21 season was the program’s first to start 10-0, but its season was halted twice due to coronavirus protocols. Still, players stuck to their plans to discuss social justice issues and engage in activism. They wore slogans like “Wolverine Against Racism” on their uniforms and warm-up gear and registered people to vote. Social justice has proven to be a way for Hillmon, who leads the team on the field, to help strengthen the team’s bonds.
Hillmon, 20, grew up in Cleveland and his family was his entry into basketball: Her mother, NaSheema Anderson, played at Vanderbilt and in the American Basketball League, and her grandmother Gail Williams played at Bethune-Cookman and Cleveland State. Hillmon, who is black, was comfortable talking about racism and discrimination with her parents, but she hadn’t thought about combining activism with her basketball career until George Floyd was killed by the police last May.
“I couldn’t stay silent about it any longer,” she said.
Hillmon started by reading the news, looking up words and phrases she didn’t know, like “microaggressions” and “implicit bias,” and attending anti-racism seminars. She also began reading books like “March” by the late Rep. John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia.
“For most of my life, I was sheltered,” Hillmon said. “So I haven’t necessarily had to experience even a quarter of some of the stories I’ve heard. But it definitely made me think twice about, you know, how someone phrased something, or how one thing or another was put together.
At the same time, Michigan coach Kim Barnes Arico was reaching out to her Black players to check on them following protests in response to Floyd’s death. “She could just say, ‘No, we’re here to play basketball and go to school.’ We are not here to be activists. We are not here to play politics. It’s the simplest solution,” Hillmon said. “But she didn’t care what other people would think, she cared about what was right.”
Barnes Arico and Hillmon joined the Big Ten Equality Coalition, which was announced in June last year in part to encourage athletes to express their views. But they quickly realized that it would be just as important to have frank, open, and difficult conversations as a team about racism, something they had never done before.
“We needed to talk about these issues because they don’t just affect the black girls on the team,” Hillmon said. “They affect everyone.”
So they started talking, both via video conference and after they were able to practice in person. They read articles together about anti-racism and watched films, including “Selma,” about the 1965 protests in Alabama that helped expand voting rights. It hasn’t been easy, Hillmon said, especially when it came time to have deeper, more personal conversations.
“You don’t always have to think about it,” Hillmon recalled talking about racism to a white teammate. ” It is reality. I have to think about it, and you don’t.
The conversations grew alongside other efforts, including messages about team gear chosen individually by each player. They celebrated Martin Luther King’s birthday, Black History Month and Women’s History Month, asking every player at practice to teach their teammates something new.
“It can’t just be a sound bite. It has to be a constant battle and a constant fight,” Barnes Arico said. “I feel like it’s my responsibility – more than being someone who is happy with X’s and O’s, it’s about teaching these women to use their voice, to be powerful, to keep asking why and to keep trying to push the needle.”
This connection has changed players’ perspectives and how they compete together.
“This is a big turning point in our program,” Barnes Arico said. “We have a lot of people from different backgrounds and we’ve had to educate ourselves. It allowed us to really step back, be closer to each other, and feel like we could connect with each other on a different level.
And, Hillmon said, they hope that connection can help them as they move deeper into the NCAA Tournament.
“It just means an awful lot to know that someone you call Coach wants to lead in more than just their coaching area,” Hillmon said. “You go a little harder, because you have someone behind you who vouches for you and goes as hard for you as for yourself.”
