How Dasha Biriuk's family escaped war in Ukraine and found haven with Webb School girls basketball
BELL BUCKLE – The scene two years ago is fresh in Dasha Biriuk's mind.
She was 15 years old, frightened by what was happening outside the van. Russian soldiers were known to pull Ukrainians from escape convoys and transport them to prisons. Some were tortured and murdered.
Now Dasha’s mother, Iryna Tsekova, was separated for questioning by the Russians because they disapproved of a photo on her cell phone.
“I’ve probably never prayed as much as I did on that trip,” Dasha said. “It was the longest way ever.”
Iryna convinced the soldiers to release her. She and her daughters successfully escaped their home and joined 6.3 million refugees displaced by Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine.
Nine months later, they traveled 6,000 miles to Tennessee on a journey scarred by war and mended by basketball.
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Dasha is a star 6-foot-1 junior shooting guard at Webb School - Bell Buckle now, with Power 5 scholarship offers from Vanderbilt, Maryland, Mississippi State, Ohio State, Louisville, BYU and Clemson. She was named a TSSAA Miss Basketball finalist last week and will lead surging Webb (13-12) into the Division II-AA Middle Region tournament on Wednesday.
Iryna, 45, played professional basketball in Europe from age 17 to 40 and once was an assistant coach for the Ukrainian senior women’s national team. She knows her daughter’s talent.
“She always played in older divisions growing up,” Iryna said through a translator. “When she was 11 and finally started playing with 11-year-olds, the team scored 71 points in one game.
“Dasha scored 70 of those.”
How Dasha Biriuk’s family escaped danger in Ukraine
The ball hit the net with a sizzling swish.
“She’s been waiting for that shot,” Dasha hollered during a 1-on-1 game with her mom in Webb’s gymnasium, nestled in the little town of Bell Buckle, a population of 399 in Bedford County.
Dasha has a bubbly personality. Webb girls basketball coach Brody Curry says she shows no signs of trauma from her family’s harrowing escape.
But there are painful reminders. “Every Wednesday,” Dasha said, “the school has fire drills. The first few months it was like, ‘Oh my God, what is that?” The alarms gave her flashbacks of bomb sirens.
Her mom, who now works for Sage Dining, the contract company Webb uses for student meals, once broke down crying during a fire drill.
“We love her. You can see she is still struggling,” said Iryna’s supervisor Daslav Glavan, who immigrated from then communist-controlled Croatia in 1981.
As her family’s sole provider, Iryna was responsible for getting them out of Berdyansk, a seaside city targeted by Russia because of its port. Bombs fell constantly. Columns of tanks cut through the streets. Neighbors disappeared.
“It was all stress, all the time,” Iryna said.
There was little food and no cellular service. Iryna fed her family leftover dairy products and sausage from a local factory. Families were allowed one loaf of bread each. After five weeks, “there was no choice” but to leave, Iryna said.
Some escape convoys were being bombed, but she knew someone leading an alternate route to Ukrainian-controlled Zaporizhzhia. At 6 a.m. on March 31, 2022, she arrived at a 20-vehicle caravan with Dasha; her youngest daughter, Maria; and a friend she knew through basketball.
They boarded a 15-passenger minivan with one backpack apiece. It took 12 hours to travel 125 miles because of mandatory searches at 13 Russian checkpoints.
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They arrived safely and later traveled to Latvia, where Dasha joined the Ukrainian women’s national team, playing as a 15-year-old in the U20 division. The family lived in school dormitories for five months.
“I can’t even imagine how hard that was for my mom,” Dasha said. “She was the only one who took care of us.”
How Webb School’s Dasha Biriuk arrived in United States
Boris Lelchitski was taken aback when he saw Dasha compete at the 2022 European Championships in Latvia. He knew Iryna as a player and her daughter’s style was similar.
Lelchitski became a leading WNBA agent after immigrating 33 years ago from St. Petersburg, Russia, to the United States. When he reconnected with Iryna, she was concerned about her daughters having been out of school for the last five months.
“That takes guts what she did,” Lelchitski said. He wanted to assist. He’d been former Lady Vols star Candace Parker’s agent and had other Tennessee connections, one of whom was Matt Shewmake, Webb’s girls basketball coach at the time.
Shewmake reached out to David Brown, a Webb School Board of Trustees member at the time. Brown and his wife, Ranea, had fostered children through different programs before and offered to sponsor Iryna’s family through the Uniting for Ukraine program, a federal pathway for Ukrainian citizens to stay in the U.S. for two years.
The Browns had a rental property in Shelbyville where the family could stay and people nearby wanted to help too. The house was fully furnished through Shelbyville residents’ donations within a week, Ranea said, including dishes and grocery store gift cards.
Dasha and Maria qualified for financial aid at Webb and are believed to be the school's only Ukrainian refugees. “We heard their story and saw a letter written by Dasha and kind of immediately began to fall in love with that family,” Webb headmaster Ken Cheeseman said. “We interviewed her and decided this is what Webb needed to do.”
Shewmake met Dasha with two Webb basketball t-shirts at the Nashville airport in November 2022. They went to Cheddar’s restaurant in Smyrna on the way to Bell Buckle. Dasha ate her first meal in America, a bowl of pasta and shrimp.
When Iryna arrived at the Browns’ rental home, she called Lelchitski crying.
Happy tears, finally.
Dasha Biriuk becoming Tennessee girls basketball star
Dasha learned English quickly, but took Shewmake’s coaching through Google Translate and hand signals at first.
She joined a Webb team in the 2022-23 season that had six Power 5 signees and was amid a dominant three-year state championship run in Division II-A. “I remember (LSU guard) Angelica Velez just took her in and loved her from the day she walked on campus,” Shewmake said.
Dasha benefited from the competition. Her recruitment took off that summer on the AAU circuit. She’s averaging 17.5 points this season with seven rebounds, four steals and 2.5 assists while shooting 40% from 3-point range.
“If she gets the ball above her shoulders, there's a good chance it’s going in,” Curry said. “Offensively, she’s very dynamic.”
Dasha’s games feel like home to her mother. She was an athletic director and coach at a sports preparatory school before her family fled Ukraine. She wants to work in basketball again, but is proud to support her family without it.
She sat in the Lipscomb Academy bleachers during a recent Webb game when Dasha fastballed a one-handed pass to a teammate for a layup. Mother and daughter’s blue eyes met and they smiled.
They know first hand that war is hell, but basketball is heaven.
“I play with joy,” Dasha said. “I wouldn’t feel that joy if I didn't play basketball. I make sure to enjoy every second on the court.”
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Dasha Biriuk's journey from Ukraine to Webb School basketball
