Celebrating AAPI Heritage in Community College Athletics

OpEd: Celebrating AAPI Heritage in Community College Athletics

Pam Y. Eddinger

President, Bunker Hill Community College (MA)

May is AAPI Heritage Month, a month of celebrating our Asian American Pacific Islander communities. As one of three federally designated AANAPISI (Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution) colleges in Massachusetts, it is an especially joyous time because of the opportunity it affords us to lift up the many different AAPI communities we serve. Sometimes, May can seem like a thirty-one-day buffet, going from Chinese to Vietnamese to Thai to Korean to Indian to Hmong to Filipino cuisines served at the events that mark the month at Bunker Hill Community College. We can count some 29 subgroups in the AAPI communities. This is not just a lesson in the diversity of food culture: it is an illustration of the rich tapestry of Asian cultures and the strength of Pan-AAPI solidarity that are the hallmarks of this month. This variety of food nourishes our bodies, bringing cultural traditions and families back into the fold.

May, of course, is also the month that our spring semester and academic year-end. Amidst our AAPI Heritage Month lunches are nurse pinning ceremonies, final presentations and performances, and, for our student-athletes, the end of their competitive seasons—and, in some cases, the final celebration of their collegiate athletic careers.

It is fitting that AAPI Heritage Month comes at the end of the academic year and the end of an athletics season—a month of celebrating endings and beginnings, a month of looking back at what we have accomplished together and the challenges of the road ahead.

At Bunker Hill Community College and many community colleges, athletics can be overshadowed by the complex challenges our students face. The majority of our students subsist at the lowest two quintiles of income; virtually all of them work while in college, many of them full-time. Many are parents or caregivers to elders. Many are immigrants or the children of immigrants, the first in their families to go to college. Our AAPI students, who account for 15% of our overall student population, share these challenging statistics.

And yet, against the odds, our students flock to the practice fields and the gym year after year; they take time out of impossibly demanding schedules to join a team and compete. Not having participated in team sports in college, it wasn't until I became a community college president back in 2008 that I began to understand why athletics were so critical to our students, and to the life of our colleges.

It has to do with that same overflowing joy that we experience during AAPI Heritage Month. Throughout the month of May, there is a joy of solidarity in the collective pursuit of excellence. A joy that persists despite wins or losses, a joy that transcends performances good or bad. In this, athletics can teach us how to harness the vast and untapped human potential that exists in our communities, and how the actuation of that potential can bring us solidarity and great joy.

Those of us in the community college movement know that the stakes have never been higher for our institutions and for our students. We see our movement and our people beset at every turn. There are some who would denigrate the value of inclusive, transformative education. Our students must struggle to make their way in a nation where the gaps in wealth and opportunity seem unbridgeable, where their ability to finish the semester, let alone their degree, is often in doubt, and where their dream of a better future for themselves and their family hangs in the balance every day. In the face of those high stakes, those very real challenges, the grace and fellowship of the student-athlete is something sacred, for the individual and the greater good.

At Bunker Hill Community College, athletics are often a movable feast, with anywhere from six to 12 teams active in a given year. Our student-athlete population mirrors our student population at large. Like community colleges across the country, we seek out sports that speak to our local communities, and we listen to our students when they want more novel choices, like eSports. Popular standbys like volleyball, basketball, and soccer are always in the lineup. Across our teams, student-athletes and coaches stay close through personal and academic challenges, and this engagement always results in better student retention and completion.       

As with many cocurricular activities, we saw participation in athletics wane with the Pandemic, but student-athletes are returning. We have successfully fielded a baseball team this year. It was a cold, wet spring in Boston, and our baseball Bulldogs did not get off to a fast start. In fact, they did not win a game all season. But every day you could see them out on our diamond, taking batting practice, fielding ground balls, and running the bases. The losses mounted, and still there they were, a team of 14, not even enough to scrimmage, working at it together every day.

No doubt this is a lesson about persistence and hard work. But it is also a lesson of something more universal. Community college athletics and AAPI month both point the way to a newer world: a world where no one has to make their way alone, where solidarity counts for much more than wins or losses. 

As May draws to a close and commencement draws near, our teams and our students look forward to what is next. For some, it is the world of work; for others, four-year college or university in pursuit of a bachelor's degree. For our returning student-athletes, the future promises a summer of classes and off-season practice before next year's games come around again. For all of us, wherever we come from and wherever we will be at this time next year, let our joy in our work and in one another be unextinguishable -- like a great game that we never want to end.

Pam Eddinger is president of Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC), the largest of 15 community colleges in Massachusetts.  Dr. Eddinger began her tenure at BHCC in 2013 and previously served as president of Moorpark College in Southern California from 2008.

Dr. Eddinger's service in the community college movement spans more than 25 years, with senior posts in academics and student affairs, communications and policy, and executive leadership. Dr. Eddinger serves on a number of boards and commissions, including the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE), GBH Boston, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, the Boston Foundation (TBF), the Massachusetts Workforce Development Board, the Boston Private Industry Council, Achieving the Dream (ATD), the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy, and the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU). Dr. Eddinger was honored in 2016 by the Obama White House as a Champion of Change. She earned a bachelor's degree in English from Barnard College and her master's and doctorate in Japanese Literature from Columbia University.