CUNY scholar Anesia Glascoe leads the U.S. ladies within the 2025 Summer season World College Video games.
Wheelchair Sports activities Federation/Michael A. Clubine
The 2025 Summer World University Games have been expanded to incorporate wheelchair basketball – a primary for the world’s para-athletes and a chance for members of CUNY’s trailblazing inclusive and adaptive sports activities program to signify the U.S. in what is taken into account the Olympics of school athletics.
Throughout the video games in Rhine-Ruhr, Germany, this month, CUNY scholar Anesia Glascoe performed for the U.S. ladies’s crew whereas the pinnacle of CUNY’s adaptive sports activities program, Ryan Martin, coached the U.S. males’s crew. Each groups introduced house 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 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 group faculty scholar in Maryland who aspired to a profession in social work and was a standout on her college’s basketball crew. One night time that yr, she was the sufferer of a random taking pictures that left her paralyzed from the waist down. “Within the hospital, once I couldn’t really feel something, the very first thing I assumed was, ‘What am I going to do with out basketball?’ she recalled. “It was my life.”
Willpower and months of intensive rehabilitation restored a few of her mobility, sufficient for her to stroll quick distances with a brace. After which her rehab therapist recommended she attempt wheelchair basketball. The primary time she performed, it introduced her to tears: “I went from being a school basketball participant, assured on the courtroom, to, ‘How do I transfer the chair? How do I shoot the ball? I can’t do that.’”
However she caught with it, tailored her expertise and have become a star participant on the rehab hospital’s touring crew. When Ryan Martin heard about Glascoe in 2022, he reached out to her and inspired her to contemplate going again to high school – at CUNY.
Final summer season, she determined to make the transfer to play beneath Martin, a number one nationwide advocate for adaptive sports activities and a high wheelchair basketball participant himself. Glascoe enrolled at Queensborough Neighborhood 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 crew 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 guide the American crew in factors and rebounds for the match, which concluded on July 20.
“Anesia’s a fiery competitor and a pure chief for others,” Martin stated. “She’s used the chance of the CUNY adaptive sports activities program to proceed her training 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 in giving equal entry, alternative and assist for college kids 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 most important city public college system in the US.
