“She Got Game”: Empowering Newark Girls Through Access to Sports

Sixteen-year-old Vanai Bradley recently achieved something that may have seemed impossible just two years ago: rowing in her seventh regatta. In the competition, the Head of the Passaic, she raced against teams from up and down the East Coast. Now a junior at Saint Benedict’s Prep in Newark, NJ, Bradley was a freshman when she first got in a boat. “I’d never even heard of rowing before,” she says. “Where I come from, no one does rowing.”

Bradley’s impressive transformation into a seasoned rower is the result of her hard work as part of the women’s varsity team for Brick City Rowing, a competitive rowing club for Newark’s youth and the city’s first rowing club in over a century. “The last team rowed out of Newark in 1901,” says Craig White, Brick City’s founder and head coach. Since then, “the city has had extremely limited access to the Passaic river.”

Even today, any Newark rower has to enter the water a few miles upriver, in Kearny. In 2020, when White was head coach of the rowing team at Saint Benedict’s Prep, where he’s also a math teacher and the Dean of Freshmen, the pandemic shut down access to the Kearny boathouse and dock. “The other coaches and I were extremely discouraged,” he says. “We had 50 kids and no means to train them.” The next year, White founded Brick City Rowing and started making plans to build a dedicated dock and boathouse in Newark. “The idea was to create a separate entity whose sole purpose was to make sure the young people of Newark will always have access to this sport, no matter what,” White says.

Access to sports is critically important, particularly for girls and young women. It provides them with opportunities and skills that lead to a greater chance of success in school, careers and beyond, even uniquely positioning them for leadership roles. A 2023 study conducted by Ernst & Young and espnW found that a whopping 94% of female C-suite executives have a background in athletics, with more than half of them having participated at the college level.

Emmy Award-winning journalist Bonnie Bernstein can testify to the “extraordinary value” in playing sports. “The foundation of who I am is based on my experience as an athlete,” she says. A four-time All-American in gymnastics at the University of Maryland, Bernstein’s career has spanned nearly two decades covering sports for major news outlets like ESPN and CBS. “Not only would I be a different person had I not participated in sports, but I probably would not have advanced in my career the way I have.”

We recently launched an Audible Original series created and hosted by Bernstein, called She Got Game: Inspiring Women, Inspired by Sports. The series demonstrates the role that sports have played in the lives of successful, high-profile female role models. Guests on the show include world boxing champion and entrepreneur Laila Ali; Emmy Award-winning actress and college rower Aisha Tyler; and Chelsea Clinton, who played soccer in her youth and is a global health advocate and author.

Building on the impact of the series, Audible is supporting three Newark organizations that facilitate girls’ access to sports: a new girls climbing team at Method Fitness; the North Newark Lady Wolfpack softball team; and Brick City Rowing, where Audible helps support rowing costs for girls aged 12-19 and provides them an opportunity to meet a member of the U.S. Olympic women’s rowing team.

“Aligning our content with our impact work underscores our commitment to investing in our hometown and inspiring the next generation of leaders,” says Aisha Glover, Head of Audible’s Global Center for Urban Development. “We couldn’t be prouder to support these groups and to provide increased access to girls’ sports and higher levels of confidence and professional success.”

Bernstein spoke to Audible employees recently about the impact of our support for young women in athletics. “The research tells us that girls are still exiting sports at a higher frequency at an earlier age than boys,” she explained, which puts them at a disadvantage later because “every single day you're on the field, every single day you're with your teammates, you are continuing to hone life skills that will serve you well.”

Bradley is a living testament to this. She says that the skills she’s gained in the boat over the last two years, namely “discipline and consistency,” have carried over into the classroom, and her grades have improved. “Sports improves your confidence, knowledge, and sense of community,” she adds. “In a male-dominated world, girls need these skills to succeed and grow every day.”

Brick City Rowing expects to open their own Newark dock and boathouse in the spring of 2024, which will provide all of Newark’s residents with meaningful access to the river. Bradley, for one, is grateful for this upcoming development, in part because the team currently runs 4.2 miles from school to the Kearny dock to start their two-hour rowing practice. Though even this she approaches with an athlete's attitude, saying it helps her build resilience. "All the sponsors and donations through Brick City Rowing have made my experience stronger," she says. "My rowing experiences have brought me a joy that I didn’t know I would get."