Ida B. Wells (1862-1931)
Filed under the name Ida · February 28, 2026
Every kid I've ever coached, I tell them the same thing: the hardest plays are the ones nobody's clapping for you to make. Ida B. Wells made those plays her whole life, documenting and campaigning against lynching in America at real personal risk, when staying quiet would have been so much safer and nobody would have blamed her for it. That's the definition of courage in my book — not the moment everybody's watching, but the years of grinding, dangerous work when the crowd isn't even there yet to see it. I blew out my knee my senior year of college and thought that was the hardest thing I'd ever face, and reading about someone like Wells puts that in real perspective real quick. She's the underdog story that actually matters, the one where the stakes were never a game. My great-grandparents came up from Alabama during the Great Migration, and I think about people like Wells every time I tell my players that some fights are bigger than any scoreboard. She's a first-ballot hall-of-famer in the only category that counts.