PERSON OF INTEREST
hungry—and Hughes didn’t have the re-
sources to help.
Here’s the thing about Kelly Whelan.
“I don’t like to fail at anything,” she says.
“If I’m gonna do it, it’s gonna be 150,000
percent.” But she also knew that feeding
roughly 40 teenage boys six days a week
was something she couldn’t do alone. As
soon as she got home, she drafted an e-
mail to some friends, asking for help. But
something stopped her from hitting Send.
“In the back of my mind,” she says, she
thought, Can I do this?
Again, she found her way back to the
pews at church. Sitting there, praying
and reflecting, a phrase in an article she’d
brought along caught her eye: There’s no
such thing as failure; it’s God changing your
direction. That was all the reassurance she
needed. “I literally came home, hit the Send
button, and within an hour I had five [vol-
unteers]. Within a week I probably had 20.”
That’s how Team Hughes began.
“THIS IS WAY BIGGER THAN BASKETBALL,” SAYS ALICIA
WYANT. IT’S ABOUT SHARING LOVE, SETTING KIDS UP FOR
SUCCESS, AND INSPIRING OTHERS TO DO THE SAME.
At first, the group sent Wyant cereal
bars, then lunchmeat, milk, and hot dogs.
Within a year, Whelan’s Team Hughes vol-
unteer list grew to 100, including people
she knew from St. X and her job reffing
games, Alicia’s mom’s friends, and even
people Whelan met at the grocery store
and hair salon. Some dropped off food on
Whelan’s front porch or came with her
to serve the team hot meals. One bought
Christmas presents—pajama pants, socks,
and gift cards—for the whole team.
Whelan and her husband held a party
for Team Hughes volunteers and asked
the Wyants to speak; when people saw
how dedicated they were to the Hughes
kids, they “fell in love with their family,”
says Whelan, and Wyant walked away with
several thousand dollars in donations for
the team. Soon after, another volunteer do-
nated 10 new basketballs emblazoned with
the Hughes logo.
Over the next six years, donations
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“snowballed,” says Whelan, as she and
Wyant sent the volunteer boosters regular
e-mail updates about the team. The food
kept coming, but so did a fridge, three mi-
crowaves, multiple slow cookers (which
the boys learned to use), a state-of-the-
art camera to film games, top-of-the-line
Nike uniforms, and even two used cars to
transport the team.
Maybe the biggest gift of all came from
a Team Hughes volunteer who commit-
ted to pay for a dedicated team academic
advisor. Before long, the boys’ grades shot
up, eventually allowing Wyant to insti-
tute a 3.0 GPA as the team standard. That,
paired with team trips to summer camps
and tournaments (which the boys par-
tially fund themselves by working at jobs
like concessions and clean-up crews for
Bengals games), suddenly made college a
whole lot more accessible and gave kids op-
tions. “If you were great at [basketball], you
were gonna get a scholarship,” says Wyant.
“If you weren’t, you were gonna have the
academics to back it up.”
Since 2016, says Wyant, 26 out of 32 se-
niors on his basketball team have received
either a full ride or full tuition-based
scholarship to college. Since 2018, the
numbers have gotten even better: 19 of 22,
and most of his players, he adds, are first-
generation college students.
His graduates have attended schools
like Ohio State and Stony Brook, with one
playing for the latter. One team alum went
on to play NFL football; the rest include a
financial advisor, a schoolteacher with a
master’s degree, and multiple basketball
coaches. All that success translates on
the court, too. Over the last four years,
the Hughes varsity team has finished first
in its division three times and racked up
the second-most wins in Cincinnati boys’
basketball, just behind Archbishop Moeller
High School.
But for the Wyants and Whelans, “this
is way bigger than basketball,” says Ali-
cia. It’s about working hard, sharing love,
building bridges, setting kids up for suc-
cess, and hopefully, says Whelan, inspiring
others to do the same. Put simply, says Wy-
ant, “these communities”—Team Hughes
and the Hughes High School basketball
players—“have collided and produced this
super successful force.”
Wyant credits Whelan with equalizing
the playing field so his team could flour-
ish. Whelan credits Wyant with setting an
outstanding example and being the most
committed coach she’s ever seen. “I’ve
been officiating 44 years,” says Whelan. “I
don’t care if it’s Cincinnati public, Catho-
lic schools, the Greater Miami Confer-
ence—probably even the state of Ohio.
There is nobody—nobody—who does what
he does.”
She wasn’t the only one to notice. This
fall, Wyant starts a new job as Princeton
High School head coach. He hadn’t planned
on leaving Hughes, but he prayed about it
and decided it was the right move. His re-
placement will be Derrell Black, longtime
Hughes assistant coach. Whelan hopes
he’ll embrace Team Hughes as much as
Wyant did. And she already has plans to
form a Princeton version of Team Hughes,
too. (That school district, says Wyant, has
a surprising number of at-risk kids.)
Looking back at all the two have ac-
complished so far, one story sticks out.
It’s about one of Wyant’s best players, who
wore the same pair of gym shoes to school
every day. And not just to school, but to
practices, too. Other kids made fun of him.
His feet grew two sizes, so he had to cram
them in. The heel came off. Then, one day,
a Team Hughes volunteer came along and
bought the whole basketball team 67 pairs
of brand-new, top-of-the-line basketball
shoes—no small expense.
“I told the guy who donated the shoes,
Look, you may not think it’s a big deal,” says
Wyant, who keeps a photo of the boy’s old
shoes in his phone. “But I guarantee you, it’s
gonna make a difference.”
Sure enough, the minute the team put
the shoes on, “We played like we were the
best,” says Wyant. “Obviously they put the
work in, [but] they believed it. They looked
the part. They felt the part. And I was like,
Yeah, this is real.”