The gym tells the truth: watching my school change since 2018
In 2018 our girls basketball team was predominantly white — I don't think there was a single Black player. For the past three to five years the team has been mainly Black, more highly skilled, and last year we won state for the first time in school history. I want to study the data behind that change.
Here is a thing I have watched happen in my own building without ever writing it down. In 2018, our girls basketball team was predominantly white. I don't think there were any Black students on it — maybe Latinx, but I honestly don't know, and not knowing is part of the point. For the past three to five years, the team has become mainly Black and much more highly skilled. Last year we won state for the first time in our school's history. Ever.
A championship is a fact. The demographic shift underneath it is also a fact, and it is the kind of fact a school can celebrate without ever examining. Who is on the court has changed. Has anything else changed with it — who gets recruited, who gets supported, who gets assumed to belong in which spaces of the school?
I want to study the data at my school to see how the demographics have actually changed since 2018 — not just in athletics, but across enrollment, advanced courses, arts, clubs, and discipline. The basketball team is the visible tip of something. A roster is a dataset anyone can read.
This connects directly to racialized rigor. If the student body has diversified meaningfully in under a decade, then the interpretive judgments the literature warns about — whose tone gets read as defiant, whose lateness gets read as a pattern, whose struggle gets read as a question of fit — are being made about a different population than the one the school's habits were built around. Institutions change slowly. Rosters change fast.
And it connects to belonging. A team that wins state is a belonging machine — banners, pep assemblies, a place in the building's story. What does it mean for Black students to be the face of the school's greatest athletic success while the literature says students of the global majority often report the thinnest sense of belonging in predominantly white independent schools? Those two things can be true at once. That is exactly why it is worth studying.
Next step: pull what data I can ethically and legally access — rosters, enrollment figures, course enrollment, whatever the school already collects — and simply describe the change since 2018 before I interpret anything. Description first. The gym already told me the truth; now I want the numbers to say it too.