One Basket at a Time How the Hijabi Ballers are empowering Muslim female athletes By Stephanie Davoli
Growing up in India, Amreen Kadwa’s life was filled with sports. She would constantly play around in her backyard with her sisters and cousins, yet she always hoped to do something bigger and better. When she moved to Toronto at the age of 10, she had her first experience of being part of a sports team when she joined her school’s soccer team. Although she was benched most of the time, Kadwa would make her mother come to every game for the chance to watch her play. Never having any opportunity to play an organized sport before this, fifth-grader Kadwa felt an immense sense of accomplishment and pride — a feeling that she would continue to chase for the rest of her life. While Kadwa was always involved with sports in some capacity, she never felt that she was part of a community that she truly belonged to. So when her high school started a rugby team, she jumped at the opportunity to join. Kadwa fell in love with the sport. After playing for three consecutive years, she won the title of MVP. The sense of belonging and the community she found within rugby followed her after graduation and she went on to play for the Yeoman Lions RFC in Toronto. It was during that time when Kadwa realized she stuck out amongst her teammates — she was the only hijab- wearing Muslim woman on the team. But the realization that her hijab caused her to stick out amongst her peers only fueled her passion to play. After playing rugby for a total of seven years, Kadwa’s world suddenly changed when she broke her leg. The devastation of knowing that she would never be able to play her sport again was heartbreaking and she felt her athletic identity was stripped from her. The thought of leaving behind a community that had been so welcoming to her — where she had made friends and grown both as an athlete and a person — was almost too much to bear. Not one to give up easily and definitely not feeling ready to leave the sports world behind, Kadwa began writing blog posts about what it means to be a hijabi athlete in a world where her identity is often ignored and frowned upon. Soon, her blog posts attracted enough attention that another community began to form: a group of mainly Muslim and female athletes like herself, who are now known as the Hijabi Ballers. “It came down to, ‘What can I do to still feel like a part of the sports scene and how can I still give back to sports?’’’ says Kadwa, the founder and executive director of the non-profit organization. “It was obvious that there was this new-found need for a physical space for Muslim females to get together and play sports and to just be recognized and seen.” The Hijabi Ballers are now a renowned GTA-based organization known for their support and encouragement of Muslim women in sports. Since its formation in 2017, the organization has hosted many large-scale sports festivals, countless other in-person and virtual events and has cultivated a partnership with Nike and the Toronto Raptors.
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