Fresh kicks, fresh vision

Growing up, like a lot of boys his age, Osamase Ekhator ’17 was obsessed with sneakers. Luckily, his two older brothers were too, and they passed down their Jordan 3s, Adidas Ultraboosts, and New Balance 574s—shoes Ekhator never would have been able to afford on his own. 

Their generosity had a lasting impact on Ekhator, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Nigeria before he was born. Years later, he wrote about the experience in a poem titled “Hand-me-downs”:

My brothers alleviated my stress, ‘cause anytime I got dressed
they handed me something fresh, including fresh kicks.
And to a super shy kid, that really gave me confidence,
I didn’t need any compliments, I didn’t need to fit in. 

Today, Ekhator has turned his love of sneakers into a unique career. As an Innovation Concept Manager for New Balance, he works at the cutting edge of the industry he once idolized, helping to map out the future of athletic footwear. While he has long appreciated sneakers as symbols of culture and identity, his focus now is on maximizing their performance—working with designers, engineers, and developers to come up with creative solutions to challenges that may not yet exist. 

“I’m the problem finder,” Ekhator explained. “It requires a lot of athlete input, so I have the pleasure of reconnecting with BC athletes and getting their insights but also just going to games at Conte Forum to see things on the court.” 

Most of Ekhator’s work takes place behind the scenes, meeting with New Balance’s Sports Research Lab experts and members of his team to flesh out ideas. In such a competitive industry, he’s careful not to divulge too much of what he’s working on to outsiders, other than to say it’s a long way from hitting shelves. If a problem is obvious or easy to solve, it’s probably not on his radar. 

“I’ve learned that in order to get to the next step or be successful you have to take risks and you have to push boundaries,” he said. “You also want to fail fast, figure out what works and what doesn’t, and then continue to build from there.” 

Ekhator grew up in Revere, Mass., and had his sights set on Boston College from a young age, often riding the subway to Chestnut Hill just to walk around campus. As a high school junior, he attended Keith A. Francis Discovery Weekend, an event for prospective students, where he connected with members of BC’s all-male step group. At the time, Ekhator didn’t dance, he played basketball, but he was moved by the hospitality of his hosts, who treated him like a younger brother. 

“That’s what sold me, the community that was at BC already,” he recalled. “Obviously after that I had to join the group. Even though I’d never danced before, they took a chance on me. That was one of the first big risks I ever took.” 

At BC, Ekhator majored in English, but took another risk after graduation: accepting a job as a business analyst at Citizens Bank, as part of a Leadership Development Rotational Program. One of the rotations took place in Rhode Island, which was a two-hour commute for Ekhator, but he used the time alone in the car to practice freestyling, using beats on the radio as a backdrop for his spoken rhymes, which soon turned into poems. He published his first book of poetry, Situationship, in 2019, and followed it up three years later with I Am You. Both collections explore themes of love, religion, and social injustice, while reflecting Ekhator’s personal experiences as a Black man in America. 

The first time Ekhator performed one of his poems was at his sister’s wedding in 2013, and he’s participated in many spoken word events since then, including one for emerging artists hosted by WGBH at their studio in the Boston Public Library. In 2023, he launched a consulting agency serving artists and writers, and will be creating new poetry readings and other events for the Greater Boston creative community later this year. He’s already hard at work on a third book of poetry.

This spring, Ekhator returned to the BC campus as the featured speaker at Keith A. Francis Discovery Weekend, where he took rapid-fire questions from prospective students about his journey at BC and beyond. No topics were off limits.

“I tried my best to be transparent and honest with them, and I stressed to them that when I was applying to BC, it wasn’t the best school, rankings-wise, that I applied to, but it was the school that I wanted to go to,” he said. “I wanted a campus that felt like home to me, and BC ended up changing my life.”