Naseyah Dix

Whenever Naseyah Dix is feeling troubled, it’s on the basketball court where she can find her center.

“Basketball is my outlet. Basketball is my safety,” Dix said. “When I play basketball, I feel safe and I feel comfortable. I’m good at it, so I just ran with it. I want to take care of my family, and I believe basketball is my way of doing it.”

A point guard on the women’s basketball team at Bryant & Stratton College in Albany, Dix found her love of basketball while growing up in Schenectady, passed onto her and her siblings from her mother Tashana.

“She just poured the sport onto us,” Naseyah Dix said. “Me and my siblings just gravitated toward it and ran with it.”

Naseyah Dix, who starred for the Bobcats on the court this winter while also making the honor roll academically and volunteering in Albany, is one of the two collegiate honorees for the 2021 Capital District Sports Women of the Year awards.

“She has been a joy to our program and school community,” Bryant & Stratton women’s basketball coach Jahmel Samuels said.

The road to success has been a long, difficult one for Dix. Her life was thrown into chaos in May 2019 when her cousin, Ayanna Hunter, was shot and killed outside an apartment complex in Niskayuna. The loss of Hunter “made everything harder,” Dix said, and played a large role in why she didn’t complete her studies at Schenectady High School, instead working to get her GED.

Even that process included obstacles, as Dix said her college enrollment process was initially halted when she was told she hadn’t gotten her GED, only for it to arrive in the mail one day before she signed to attend Bryant & Stratton.

“It just made me more hungry,” Dix said. “To go through all that and come out of it, it’s amazing. It gives me hope. I just want to be able to be the outlet for the kids that are still in Schenectady.”

In her freshman season with the Bobcats, Dix put in a starring effort in a season disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, averaging 18 points, five rebounds and five assists per game while playing with what Samuels called “a passion of positivity.” She was twice a nominee for the USCAA Player of the Week award, made the all-tournament team when the Bobcats played at the Vaden Cup and was named the team’s most improved player.

She also maintained a 3.2 grade point average in the classroom, making the honor roll in both the fall and spring semesters. Along with her academic work, Dix was also dedicated to community service, turning her love of animals into work at the Mohawk Humane Society and her passion for engaging with young people into serving as a mentor at Albany’s South End Cafe Healthy Kids Project.

“Naseyah certainly persevered both on and off the court,” said John Quattrocchi, who served as Bryant & Stratton’s interim athletic director this past school year. “As a tenacious and hardworking player, she matched this intensity in the classroom.”

Through all her hard work, it’s basketball that remains Dix’s primary outlet. She hopes to turn her time at Bryant & Stratton into an eventual opportunity to play at a Division I school, with the ultimate goal of playing professional basketball in Europe.

“That’s the end goal,” she said. “That’s the main goal. Hopefully, I can push on to a high-major, Division I school, then go overseas.”