The Bethune-Cookman College athletics neighborhood is mourning the lack of former bowling head coach Chelsea Gilliam, who died Thursday, Aug. 7, after an almost decade-long battle with most cancers. She was 35. Identified for her brilliant, bubbly spirit and unwavering willpower, Gilliam joined the HBCU in October 2018 to guide the Wildcats’ bowling program.
She arrived from Youngstown State College and made historical past as the varsity’s first bowling head coach.
Gilliam took over Bethune-Cookman’s HBCU bowling program in the course of the 2018-19 season, navigating a yr marked by roster challenges on account of accidents. Her management and resilience left an enduring impression on the Maroon and Gold household.
A Championship Legacy
Earlier than her collegiate teaching profession, Gilliam was a standout student-athlete on the College of Pikeville. As a 2012 Pikeville girls’s bowling workforce member, she helped seize this system’s first NAIA nationwide championship. The workforce’s accomplishment earned them induction into the Bears Corridor of Fame in November 2018.
That season, Pikeville entered the yr ranked No. 1 within the NAIA Coaches Ballot and secured the No. 3 seed within the nationwide match. Gilliam and her teammates twice defeated Webber Worldwide, a workforce they’d beforehand misplaced to, to clinch the historic title.
Gilliam graduated from Pikeville in 2012 with bachelor’s levels in arithmetic and psychology.
Constructing Applications from the Floor Up
Gilliam’s teaching journey started at Union School in Kentucky. From 2012 to 2015, she led each the boys’s and ladies’s bowling groups. She guided the boys’s squad to back-to-back runner-up finishes within the Mid-South Convention Event and was named the league’s Ladies’s Co-Head Coach of the 12 months in 2014.
Gilliam spent her first yr constructing this system from scratch at Youngstown State. She recruited the inaugural roster and set the workforce schedule. The Penguins debuted in 2016-17 and rapidly rose to prominence, incomes High 25 rankings in her two seasons on the helm.
A Fighter and Inspiration
Gilliam was first recognized with breast most cancers at simply 23 years outdated in 2013. She fought by therapy, solely to be re-diagnosed in Could 2016. Her resilience impressed many, each inside and outdoors the bowling neighborhood.
She appeared in a business alongside WWE famous person Roman Reigns, sharing her most cancers journey and inspiring others going through related battles. Gilliam additionally documented parts of her chemotherapy on social media, aiming to encourage braveness and perseverance.
Earlier this month, a fundraiser was held in her honor close to her dwelling in Ormond Seashore, Fla., as she continued her therapies.
Bethune-Cookman College officers, former gamers, and colleagues throughout the HBCU bowling neighborhood bear in mind Chelsea Gilliam for her teaching achievements and the grace and willpower with which she confronted life’s best challenges.
