When Swish basketball club founder Jamiece Adams settled in Chicago in 2017, she was in search of community and a place to hoop. Having grown familiar with college life, where the community came built-in and you could form a crew off the strength of rec center runs, Adams was adjusting to life in a city where looking for a welcoming, safe place to hoop and be in community with other queer people of color was an exercise in futility.
“I kept waiting for something to be created that was a more laid-back playing environment for queer, non-binary Black folks. I was like, it’s Chicago. It’ll happen,” Adams said during our conversation back in October. “It never happened, and I was, like, ‘well maybe I could do it.’”
Heading into 2020, Adams was devising a plan to have meetups for queer people to play basketball, and be in community with each other — then the pandemic hit. With COVID-19 devastating Chicago, any type of contact sports were out of the question, not to mention the city removed basketball rims from parks across the city to encourage people to stay at home.
“When we knew we could be outside with masks around each other, I invited my friend T, and two other friends, Erma and Zipporah, to come play basketball,” Adams said. “We just had a good time playing basketball. They were really encouraging about the idea that I had for the meetups and felt like it could really take off.”
When Adams organized the first meetup for the Swish basketball club in summer 2021, it was just those same three friends who showed up, but as they kept sharing on Instagram and inviting people out to their weekly meetups, the community grew both on the internet and in real life.