Men’s basketball announced a new face in its starting lineup for its matchup against La Salle on Jan. 27. The crowd rose to its feet for Tripp Phillips, a 15-year-old Marylander with autism who was having his lifelong dream fulfilled by meeting collegiate athletes. 

GW athletes first surprised him at school and took him on a tour of the monuments. Phillips then spent the weekend with the Athletics Department, attending a women’s soccer practice – his favorite sport – on Friday and participating in a pre-game shootaround with the men’s basketball team before Saturday’s game. 

Phillips’ visit was the culmination of a year of work from students across the GW Athletics department to plan a “dream weekend” for a local young person — an effort that athletes are repeating this summer for another future recipient. Others have spent their time running programs to coach and support youth in their areas.

Here’s a look at how GW athletes spent their summers:

Dream on 3 

Senior catcher Tim Nicholson spent some of his time away from the field to fundraise and plan a “dream weekend” for kids with life-altering conditions as a co-captain for an organization called Dream On 3. 

Nicholson and women’s soccer forward Kelly Poole co-captains GW’s “collegiate dream team,” a group of student athletes that plan the weekends for their dream recipient, a five to 21 year-old with a life-altering condition, each year.

Nicholson said Phillips — the recipient from last year — still comes to some of his baseball games, including a game this summer. Both captains said they still keep in touch with Phillips. 

“Even though we’re not some big sports school, we do have a lot to offer, and we really can change the life of our dream kid, which I think we really did,” Poole said. 

GW’s current “dream team” includes 25 athletes from several different sports, including gymnastics, volleyball, tennis and cross country. Nicholson said the baseball team has nine participating members, the most of any GW team. 

“It just puts into perspective what we take for granted as college athletes can really impact someone else,” Poole said. “Preseason gets really tiring, and sometimes I just want to sleep or something, but it’s this kid’s dream, just to be a part of our weekend and the small things that we do.”

Nicholson and Poole are leading this year’s group of athletes again, but the team itself is almost entirely different from last year to maximize the efficiency of their peer-to-peer fundraising.

Nicholson and Poole raised more than $6,200 this summer through posting on social media and asking for donations from their peers. They hope to use the funds towards meals, transportation and activities.

“We raised $12,000 last year, and that’s a lot of money, but it also can go away really easily,” Nicholson said. 

Grassroots Health 

One of last year’s Dream On 3 members, senior women’s basketball player Maxine Engel, is spending her summer promoting health education in middle schools around the District to fill education gaps for D.C. youth.  

This summer, Engel, middle distance runner Rita Mazumder and soccer players Alana Beasley and Elizabeth Cruz are training fellows at Grassroots Health, a project that enlists NCAA athlete volunteers to facilitate health education and promotion programs in local schools. 

“Growing up in middle school and high school, we never talked about nutritional health and being an athlete I feel like I’ve become more aware of how important it is to fuel yourself,” Mazumder said. “And being able to show this to kids at this age is so important because it’s their formative years, and that’s something that I really connected with when I first joined [Grassroots Health].”

The fellows have already conducted facilitation at two summer camps as they prepare to enter some of the more than 10 middle schools where Grassroots runs programs throughout the District. Once the athletes begin facilitating a program, they return to the same school every day for six weeks. 

The Grassroots Health curriculum focuses on health topics that D.C. middle schoolers may be undereducated on, ranging from mental health to sexual health. Engel said the mental health component of the work motivated her the most because athletes can share personal experiences with kids who may have developed stigmas around mental illness. 

“You can’t start solving problems without educating people first and then, just realizing all the social factors and contexts that people live in and meeting people where they are,” Engel said. 

Block Party

Men’s basketball forward Darren Buchanan Jr. hosted a basketball camp for kids in the D.C. area over the summer, bringing in other Division 1 athletes and young entrepreneurs to help out. 

Buchanan said he’s motivated to act as a positive role model for youth to prevent them from going down the paths of some of his friends growing up at Jackson-Reed High School, as he said some people he knew have since been arrested or even murdered.

“[I’m] just trying to do my part this summer while still taking care of what I gotta take care of for myself, which is getting better on the court and taking care of my business in the classroom as well,” Buchanan said. 

Buchanan will host a back-to-school block party on Aug. 24, giving away school supplies, backpacks, and free haircuts to students from elementary school through high school. 

“I’m helping them get prepared to go back to school, which is something that’s very important,” Buchanan said. And I know a lot of families in the DC community have a hard time against certain supplies, so I definitely wanted to help take care of that for them.” 

Buchanan said his mother, who hosted her own block party when Buchanan was growing up in their neighborhood, influenced him to host the back-to-school block party.

As athletes return to campus and get ready to go back to school, the volunteer work they’ve been doing throughout the summer will continue. Engel, Mazumder and the other Grassroots Health fellows will recruit and train volunteer athletes to from local universities, including several other GW athletes. Nicholson, Poole and the rest of the dream team will continue fundraising and planning in anticipation of a much earlier dream weekend date than last year’s January basketball game.