Trinity, Wesleyan compete for inclusion, diversity
The Trinity College that Tedi Makrigiorgos arrived at last fall was not the same Trinity she saw on her official visit with the women’s basketball team.
“When I was looking at Trinity — I’m on the basketball team and it’s a very diverse team, one of the most diverse teams on campus,” said Makrigiorgos, a freshman from Viena, Va. “The people who I hung out with, who I was introduced to — it was very diverse. I thought that’s what the whole campus was like, coming in.
“Once I got to school, I realized it’s very white, mostly conservative, and coming in, after the Black Lives Matter movement [last summer], it was very uneasy on campus because it was so polarized.”
When she found out about the Trinity athletic department’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee, she wanted to join.
“I want to work toward the Trinity I thought I was coming into, which was a diverse population where everybody is respected and comfortable and can speak their minds,” she said. “That’s what I put on my application.”
Trinity’s DEI committee, recently formed, aims “to create and foster safe spaces for underrepresented and marginalized groups and work to dismantle systematic racism that exists in our ecosystem,” the college stated in a release.
The committee also plans to create educational programming to encourage an anti-racist environment and help develop allyship strategies.
Trinity’s group mirrors a broader initiative across its conference, the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC), which launched a conference-wide coalition of student-athletes of color in late November.
Wesleyan football player
Babila Fomuteh, a senior from Dacula, Ga., is the president of the Wesleyan Student-Athletes of Color Leadership Council (SACLC) and one of Wesleyan’s representatives to the NESCAC coalition.
“It started this past summer at the height of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor [killings and BLM protests],” said Fomuteh, who is Black. “Even before that occurred, attending a PWI [predominantly white institution] such as Wesleyan, as great as it is — being a minority, coming from the South, it’s definitely an adjustment. The representation isn’t there as if you were attending a state school or an HBCU [historically black college and universities]. There was always that lost feeling there.
“Being an athlete helped a little bit, and football, we are the most diverse team, and the team consisted of more POC [Person of Color] people. And that was great but at the same time, I was still lost.
“This past summer, at the height of everything, it really brought us together, the whole NESCAC, maybe we should be doing something. It’s the perfect time. We have everyone’s ear. Everyone’s paying attention. Everyone’s listening. If we really came together, to focus on initiatives that could do something in the future — we won’t reap the benefits now but doing something for future kids who come to the NESCAC so they’ll have a better experience.”
There are a host of initiatives that organizers hope will be implemented at each school, including anti-racism and allyship training for administrators, coaches and athletes, diversity and anti-bias training for officials, promoting diversity in recruiting and reaching out to Black alumni for mentorship as well as networking opportunities for student-athletes of color.
Myla Stovall, a Wesleyan field hockey player who is the vice president of the SACLC and another representative for the NESCAC coalition, hoped that diversity and anti-racism training could be included with other standard training for athletes.
“I definitely have this particular goal of the council very close to home,” said Stovall, a junior from West Orange, N.J. “I’ve been in a predominantly white environment all my life, my high school, now at Wesleyan, and field hockey is not the most diverse sport. I’ve been talking to my coach about it. She’s been really great about helping to figure out how we can increase our recruiting diversity.”
Stovall is one of two Black women on the Wesleyan team.
“Everybody’s been really great,” she said. “We’ve established a racial justice committee on my team. We had a meeting this past Monday about how we can be anti-racist and how we can check our privilege and things like that.”
Hannah Hagy, an assistant swim coach and member of the Trinity DEI, wants to get Trinity more involved with the Hartford community surrounding the school.
“You have a school in Hartford and you’d think, ‘Oh, it’s got to be
interactive with the community and have these great relationships with the city of Hartford,’ and I think the school likes to have that thought, and it’s something they really want to do,” Hagy said. “We really want to be able to reach out to the community and make the community feel like it’s included in what Trinity does, especially in athletics, so if we can work with people in the community to use our facilities, to give people the opportunity to do sports they might not have the opportunity to do.
“That was something I thought was going to be in place when I came to work at Trinity, and it wasn’t. I’ve been pushing for that. They have the Capitol squash program that works with kids from Hartford. We’d love to do that. Swimming and diving is a sport that’s pretty privileged, having access to pools.”
Hagy has been trying to find ways to work with the nearby Boys & Girls Club, not just with swimming but with other sports as well.
“That’s a goal we have to address within the committee and bring it to the department as a whole to figure out how we can do that,” she said.
With the pause in sports in the NESCAC due to the pandemic, there is more time for athletes and coaches to work on anti-racism initiatives.
“We’ve kind of been preaching that in the athletic department,” Hagy said. “‘Talk to your kids. They’ve got time now. It’s in the news. It’s on their mind now.’ It’s great to have a conference-wide committee to enact some change.”