Grace was 13 when a Greenhouse Sports coach arrived at her Croydon school and introduced basketball during PE. The sport gave her a passion, but it was the belief of her coach, Alexandra Raymond, that transformed her future.
Grace, now 25, went on to play National League basketball, earn coaching and officiating qualifications, become Head Girl, secure a place at university and, by age 25, earn more than her parents' combined income.
From exclusion to liberation
Before that year 8 summer term, Grace describes her life with the words “absence” and “excluded”. As the oldest of four siblings (later seven) in a low-income household, she lacked material things other children took for granted. As the child of strict immigrants from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she had to be home by 7pm and felt she was “missing out”.
“I found netball very constricting,” she says. “As soon as you touch somebody, it’s a foul. But the Greenhouse coach started doing dribbling and shooting drills and what I loved most was the physical contact. Instead of feeling restricted, I felt liberated. It is one of the happiest memories of my childhood.”
At the end of the session, the coach picked some girls to try out for the school’s inaugural basketball team, and Grace, one of the youngest, was selected.
A coach who had her back
Grace says the mentoring relationship proved most valuable. “Coach Alex and I connected as people,” she says. “She was like an aunty to us — things I wouldn’t tell my parents, I could tell her. My parents were very strict: I wasn’t allowed a boyfriend until I was 18 and I wasn’t allowed to travel outside of Croydon because my parents worried about youth violence. Coach persuaded them to relax those rules so I could play basketball outside the borough, and I talked to her about boy crushes, school problems and the hurtful things people said. I always felt Coach Alex had my back.”
Greenhouse also helped Grace take her first steps into work, encouraging her to apply for an internship with M&C Saatchi, which she secured, before being employed as a junior account executive. After two years, she moved on to a “dream job” with a global sporting brand as a digital publishing assistant.
Campaign aims to reach 500 young people
This month, The Standard has joined forces with Greenhouse Sports to create Sporting Chance, a campaign championing sports coaching and mentoring to help transform the lives of disadvantaged young Londoners. So far, £500,000 has been pledged by the Evening Standard Dispossessed Fund, of which half will fund Greenhouse programmes in five secondary schools in London, reaching up to 500 children. The other £250,000 will support four further charities offering coach-mentoring in football, boxing, martial arts and kayaking.
Donations of £15 could enable a young person to access the programme for a week; £65 could provide four weeks of coaching and mentoring; £165 could provide coaching and mentoring during school holidays; and £800 could provide a full year of coaching and mentoring.
“I don’t know where I would be without Greenhouse,” Grace says. “Their fingerprints are all over everything I have done, including achieving my financial and career goals for my twenties and building better relations with my parents and other authority figures. Now I’m more financially stable and I live in my own rented flat. If my younger brothers want the latest football boots, they know they can hit up their big sis.”
