’10s
THE SKY’S THE LIMIT
Hannah Cooke ’14 founded Bowdoin College’s Athletes of Color Coalition— and she’s just warming up. by Megan Tady | Photos by Chattman Photography
“Y
ou got beat by a girl!”
It was the same familiar jab Hannah Cooke has heard for years lobbed amongst the boys, and now men, who have eaten her dust. This time, she was at a pick-up basketball game at a YMCA in Pomfret, Conn., on a Saturday morning, the gymnasium filled with the sounds of shoes squeaking up and down the court as two makeshift teams battled for buckets. Cooke, who was a basketball and track and field varsity athlete at both Berkshire and then at Bowdoin College, handled the ball with ease, her footwork deft. One male player ribbed another: “Don’t let a girl beat you. That’s so humiliating.” But why, Cooke found herself wondering, yet again. Why is the ultimate humiliation among some men being physically bested by a woman? Most of her life, Cooke has been the only female athlete in traditionally male spaces, and she’s often been the only person of color
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in dominant white places—from sports teams to classrooms to her home state of Maine, which is 95% white. Her athletic pursuits and her academic focus have been entwined in and dedicated to trying to understand, and then dismantle, a patriarchal system threatened by strong female athletes of color. “That phrase—‘beat by a girl’— reinforces this assumption that a girl should never in any context be beating a guy, and especially not in sports where masculinity is so much about physical dominance,” she says. “If you are a boy, it is unacceptable to lose to a girl. It doesn’t matter how many more hours she’s spent in the gym or on the field, because [the idea is that] nature blessed all males with a baseline of skill that is better than any level a female could possibly reach.” Cooke, who graduated from Bowdoin in 2018, earned her bachelor’s degree in Africana studies and Government and Legal studies. She founded the college’s Athletes of Color Coalition
(ACC), building a support system the campus lacked. And she worked closely with the athletic department to create and facilitate workshops for sports’ captains and athletic teams engaged in discussions about race and its impact on the culture, relationships, and level of support on a team. For two consecutive years, she organized a program called, “Winning Together: Race in Athletics,” which included panel discussions with professors and alumni about race and sports, and showcased anonymous stories about athletes’ experiences with race at Bowdoin. Her success at rapidly building the ACC’s prominence on campus inspired other schools to seek her advice on how to do the same thing, including Amherst College, Tufts University, and Wesleyan College. Currently, she’s helping advise a coach at Trinity College as he supports students’ efforts to start their own ACC. But first—and what inspired her to start the ACC—Cooke had an epiphany. When basketball season started at
