Black Women in Sports
Why This Running Group For Black Women Is So Important
Toni Carey and Ashley Hicks-Rocha weren’t always on the same page when it came to exercise. Ashley was always an athlete and played collegiate soccer. “[But] I like to say that the pinnacle of my athletic career was junior pro basketball in elementary school,” Carey says. “I was an expert couch potato.”
However, inspired by her sorority sister Hicks-Rocha’s interest in running, Carey started her own running journey and ended up falling in love with it. But “we quickly realized there weren’t a lot of minorities in this space,” Toni says: specifically, black women.
“[Running] felt like this super exclusive club,” she explains. “I remember going to my first 10K. I was standing in the crowd, looking around, and thinking in that moment, There’s no one out here that looks like me.” Out of that feeling of isolation, she and Ashley created Black Girls Run, a network of more than 200,000 people that started as one humble Facebook group.
Below, we talked to Carey about being inspired to get into fitness and why she and Hicks-Rocha felt so strongly about founding Black Girls Run.
How did you and Ashley meet?
“It was my freshman year of college and we pledged the same sorority — we’re both members of Alpha Kappa Alpha. When we both pledged, she became the president and I was the treasurer. We didn’t like each other at first, but we realized we worked really well together and we always knew that we would start something together. I guess the writing…
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