College basketball player loses appeals

By Sean Rooney on December 1, 2018.

srooney@medicinehatnews.com @MHNRooney

A Medicine Hat College student-athlete who went public alleging unfair treatment in being kicked off the Rattlers men’s basketball team and out of college residence is moving on.

Osato Obaseki had appealed both cases, but found out via separate decisions in the past two weeks those appeals were denied.

“The basketball one didn’t necessarily fail, it was more of a mutual agreement,” Obaseki said Friday after receiving notice the residence appeal was also over. “I’m just going to finish my school year, my program transfers to a couple universities so this was my last semester.”

The social work student from Vancouver has stayed with friends, sleeping on a couch for the first couple weeks, and looks forward to leaving a city he seems to have a love-hate relationship with. He arrived last summer looking forward to furthering his education and playing the sport he loves, but it hasn’t gone as planned.

“I’ll go home for a bit, I need to get out of this toxic environment,” he said. “It’s more mentally draining than physical, to be honest.

“I’ve been keeping low key, staying low, staying out of the public eye. Medicine Hat people, they just didn’t like the city being publicized in a negative view, they didn’t understand the concept that I was trying to talk about.”

Medicine Hat College won’t divulge any details of the appeals but associate vice-president Irlanda Price said Friday she hopes both sides took lessons from the uncomfortable experience.

“We feel like the best decision was reached for everyone, and he was very gracious throughout the process,” said Price. “He’s been working with his faculty, the co-ordinator and chair of his program to talk about social justice, what that means and how he can move his career around. We just want to see him successfully graduate.”

Obaseki said he has a 3.2 grade-point average and has had productive discussions with friends and faculty. He was kicked off the basketball team following a series of incidents including a confrontation with an assistant coach and inadvertently hurting a resident assistant who was trying to investigate a party.

He felt the fact he’s a 6-foot-5 African-Canadian played a role in how he was treated, and would like to see even more cultural awareness from an institution which recently painted a crosswalk in support of gender and sexual orientation diversity.

“One positive I would like to see is for them to actually integrate a diversity day or something for the school,” said Obaseki, who was in his fifth and final year of athletic eligibility. “They have flags up for different nations, the LGBQT+ crosswalk, but for me I want future generation kids to be treated the same as other kids.

“My whole message was to spread social awareness. People who are of Caucasian background … they can’t necessarily understand or comprehend because of their privilege.”

On the court, the Rattlers men went through the first semester with a 6-3 league record. They’re in Idaho this weekend for a trio of exhibition games, the first of which they lost 87-69 to Grays Harbour College Thursday night.

The athletics department is hosting a major fundraising event tonight. The second annual Jingle and Mingle includes dinner, live entertainment and a silent auction in the college gymnasium.

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