CUNY pupil Anesia Glascoe leads the U.S. ladies within the 2025 Summer time World College
Video games.
Credit score: Wheelchair Sports activities Federation
The 2025 Summer time World College Video games have been expanded to incorporate wheelchair basketball – a primary for the world’s para-athletes and a possibility for members of CUNY’s trailblazing inclusive and adaptive sports activities program to symbolize the U.S. in what is taken into account the Olympics of faculty athletics.
Through the video games in Rhine-Ruhr, Germany, this month, CUNY pupil Anesia Glascoe performed for the U.S. ladies’s workforce whereas the pinnacle of CUNY’s adaptive sports activities program, Ryan Martin, coached the U.S. males’s workforce. Each groups introduced dwelling bronze medals.
For CUNY, representing the U.S. on this world stage is a proud achievement and a strong instance of the expansion of our inclusive and adaptive sports activities program since its inception in 2017.
An Inspiring Exemplar
Few athletes are extra inspiring than Anesia Glascoe. In 2021, she was a 20-year-old neighborhood school pupil in Maryland who aspired to a profession in social work and was a standout on her faculty’s basketball workforce. One night time that yr, she was the sufferer of a random capturing that left her paralyzed from the waist down. “In the hospital, when I couldn’t feel anything, the first thing I thought was, ‘What am I going to do without basketball?’ she recalled. “It was my life.”
Willpower and months of intensive rehabilitation restored a few of her mobility, sufficient for her to stroll brief distances with a brace. After which her rehab therapist advised she attempt wheelchair basketball. The primary time she performed, it introduced her to tears: “I went from being a college basketball player, confident on the court, to, ‘How do I move the chair? How do I shoot the ball? I can’t do this.’”
However she caught with it, tailored her abilities and have become a star participant on the rehab hospital’s touring workforce. When Ryan Martin heard about Glascoe in 2022, he reached out to her and inspired her to contemplate going again to highschool – at CUNY.
Final summer time, she determined to make the transfer to play beneath Martin, a number one nationwide advocate for adaptive sports activities and a prime wheelchair basketball participant himself. Glascoe enrolled at Queensborough Group Faculty as a liberal arts main with plans to renew her pursuit of a social work diploma. She has excelled academically and was the highest scorer on CUNY’s ladies’s wheelchair workforce this yr.
Within the World College Video games, she fell from her chair and bruised her shoulder after colliding with an opposing participant however bounced again to steer the American workforce in factors and rebounds for the match, which concluded on July 20.
“Anesia’s a fiery competitor and a natural leader for others,” Martin stated. “She’s used the opportunity of the CUNY adaptive sports program to continue her education and rebuild her life.”
Her story exemplifies CUNY’s dedication to our college students with disabilities, and it’s a robust instance of how the College’s broad mission of inclusive alternative may be life-changing for all our college students.
This month, as we mark the thirty fifth anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Act, we rejoice how far the world has are available giving equal entry, alternative and assist for college students with disabilities, together with almost 10,000 who attend CUNY campuses.
Matos Rodríguez is the chancellor of The Metropolis College of New York (CUNY), the biggest city public college system in the USA.
