Women's Little 500 has first all-black team

[hoosier]

Deep in the midst of a February snowstorm -- Team Marshall sat.
But this time, not idly.
This time, Old Man Winter wouldn't confine them to working out at the Student Recreational Sports Center, or even worse, doing nothing at all.
Team Marshall found a savior, but it wasn't in the form of a groundhog or a warm front. It was four words from graduate student and distance rider Autumn Drew -- "I'll be your coach."
So at 7 a.m. on the day of February's biggest snowstorm, the riders found themselves in their newfound coach's basement, riding on mounted bikes lent from the IU Student Foundation.
It eventually became a habit for the first-year Little 500 team to ride in Drew's basement on days unfavorable for outdoor training. When it was necessary, Drew would even fix her riders breakfast, let them use her shower and even drop them off at class. And for a team with little money, little support and little experience, it would take help like Drew's to get them to the track on race day.
"It's been a struggle," said Team Marshall junior LaToya Collins. "Things have been a little hard, but we've been working with what we have."
Junior Derren Chapman was the first to help.
Chapman, founder of the team, originally had the idea of Team Marshall -- an all-black women's team.
"He basically pushed us," Collins said. "But we didn't have any direction -- we were kind of making it up as we went along."
It's hard enough for a team to just make things up as they go along, but it's even harder when the team doesn't own its bikes. That's where the IUSF came in.
"The IUSF have been our biggest helpers and friends," Drew said. "They realized we didn't have anything and they lent us trainers and bikes -- without them, we wouldn't have been able to do anything."
The riders eventually earned the trust of IUSF, which became extremely lenient about lending out its bikes. But Team Marshall was still just a group of rookie riders without their own bikes and hardly any funding.
Junior Olivia Fradin, who is the team's leader, did what she could for her team. She went to meetings and pooled support from IU's black community, but her biggest contributor was John Benenate -- the president of a Portland organization called Bicycles and Ideas for Kids' Empowerment, or BIKE.
Benenate secured rollers and bikes so the team could practice outside the IUSF's lending hours.
Now, almost three months later, it's hard to say Team Marshall has leveled the playing field. But with a coach like Drew, a founder like Chapman, a leader like Fradin and contributors like BIKE and IUSF -- it's safe to say the riders have made it out of the snow storm.
"(The difficulty) brings us closer together in some ways," Fradin said. "Because we only have each other to depend on."