Throughout her eight-year coaching tenure, Beulah Osueke built the West Catholic Lady Burrs from an afterthought to a championship-winning program
To the players who called her “Coach B,” Beulah Osueke was more than just a coach.
Some looked at her as a parent. Others, as an older sister. Sometimes she was their financier. Often she was their disciplinarian.
Osueke, 35, was whoever the girls basketball players at West Catholic Prep, a high school in Philadelphia, needed her to be — an experience that opened her eyes to their world of hardships.
Coaching helped her understand “the magnitude of injustice and how it manifests so early,” Osueke said, “and how it thwarts people’s — particularly Black people’s — opportunity to reach whatever dreams they had.”
Throughout her eight-year tenure, Osueke built the West Catholic Lady Burrs into a championship-winning program, securing six district titles and winning the school’s first basketball state title in 2021. But teaching teenage Black girls their worth and how to respond to discrimination is what she considers her biggest victory.
