6/29/2026 10:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball, Paul Coro, Lopes Insider Blog
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Lopes assistant helped bring Biriuk's family to U.S. as high school coach
By: Paul Coro
The connection that brought Dasha Biriuk 6,500 miles from her Ukrainian hometown to Grand Canyon this month is more about the brutal and best sides of humanity than basketball.
Biriuk, GCU's newest guard after transferring from Ohio State, is reuniting with Lopes assistant coach Matt Shewmake, who was a stranger receiving a heart-tugging plea from a mutual acquaintance in 2022 to open a path that restored Biriuk's safety, education and basketball in America.
Three days after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, Biriuk awoke wth her mother and her younger sister to Russian soldiers taking over their town, Berdiansk, for its seaport on Feb. 27, 2022.
Berdiansk's streets were patrolled by tanks and lined with armored soldiers hoisting machine guns. Schools were shuttered. Biriuk and her family were homebound for weeks, as food turned sparse, WiFi became nearly nonexistent and television stations went off air.
Biriuk's father had left four months earlier for work in Slovakia, and they were unable to call him to share that they were alive until she and friend maneuvered to a bank, where 100 people were fighting flickering WiFI to make calls or connections.
Biriuk's mother, Iryna Tsekova, played professional basketball for 23 years before becoming a sports academy administrator, the type of Ukranian profession feared to be targeted by Russians for control of schools. Biriuk, mother and sister
"My mom was scared they would kidnap her," Biriuk said. "It was pretty scary. The Russians would just be walking around with big guns. They stopped cars. We didn't have imports. No food or gas was coming into our city. Nothing. Nothing was left in the stores except alcohol."
Four weeks after Berdiansk was occupied by military force, Biriuk, her mother, her sister and a basketball teammate boarded a van with 11 others before sunrise to escape amid a caravan. Each carried a backpack, with Biriuk stuffing hers with basketball shoes, a uniform and a deflated basketball.
The usual three-hour drive to Zaporizhzhia lasted 13 hours because of 13 military checkpoints.
"You never know when they were going to turn you back," Biriuk said. "They checked our backpacks and phones every time. We had deleted everything – Instagram, TikTok. But on one stop, they found a photo on my mom's phone. It was nothing, but they were going crazy. She was like, 'I'm sorry, You can take my phone. But my kids are on there. I can't leave them.'
"We heard that three days after we left, the Russian soldiers came to my mom's sports school searching for her. We were gone. We just got lucky."
From there, they traveled to Latvia, where 15-year-old Biriuk played for Ukraine's under-16 and under-18 teams in the European Championships. That caught the notice of Boris Lelchitski, a pioneer and leader among women's sports agents who immigrated from Russia in the 1990s. He was reconnecting with Teskova, who he knew as a pro player and found to be a mother concerned about her daughter being out of school. Biriuk and Shewmake
Lelchitski called Shewmake, a client who was the head girls basketball coach at The Webb School in Bell Buckle, Tennessee.
"Can you help this kid?" he asked Shewmake, who was compelled by the situation and approached the head of school with photographs of the conditions of a town where they could not return and a gymnasium where they were living.
"No real motivation was the basketball part," said Shewmake, whose Webb teams won the previous two state championships. "This girl and this family were living a third-world life. They didn't choose that. I asked her mom one time, 'How hard was it to make the choice to leave home?' She said, 'It was no choice. Our neighbors would leave for work, and I would never see them again.' " Biriuk's family with Browns
A day later, Webb leadership agreed to cover tuition for Biriuk and her sister, Maria, and school trustee Dr. David Brown and his wife, Renee, offered their rental home to the family for free. Community business owners, who Shewmake did not know, followed with donations of furniture.
Shewmake met them at the Nashville airport with their life in three bags and no words to express their appreciation.
"I can't even describe the feeling because I couldn't say anything in English," Biriuk said. "There was a great energy from them.
"They were all so nice in the town. I didn't expect that somebody would take care of us like that because we're nobody. We just met. You don't know us. Why would you do that? I'm beyond grateful. They decided to take three random people to the U.S. and spend so much time on random people. It's incredible. If not for them, I wouldn't be here, there, nowhere."
When Biriuk barely missed a shot in her first Webb on-court workout with Shewmake, he knew she was talented. But that year was one of acclimation for Biriuk. She was a member of a state championship team, joined soccer and track and field and picked up English.
Shewmake left to coach Montverde Academy in Florida the following year but kept in touch as Biriuk flourished in the tiny Tennessee town of about 400 people. She scored 26 points in the state championship game as a senior and signed with Ohio State when she was ranked nationally as the No. 74 player in her class.
Biriuk, a 6-foot-1 guard, only logged 7.3 minutes per game in 20 appearances as a freshman last season. But her shooting (11 for 32 on 3-pointers) and scoring (25 points vs. Niagara and 15 points vs. Bellarmine) flashed well above her 3.3 scoring average.
Shewmake joined GCU last year as an assistant coach when Winston Gandy became head coach, and Biriuk was aware when she entered the transfer portal. She hoped her favorite coach would call, and he did. Biriuk knew Nike Hoop Summit teammate Nyadieng "Nidi" Yiech had committed to the Lopes, which was enough for Biriuk to understand how strong the program is.
"Dasha felt like it was the right thing for somebody that knew her game to push her, hold her accountable, help her in some areas that need to grow," Shewmake said. "We're in a good position with what she brought to the table. It's a win-win. I trust in her ability and who she is as a worker and player that she would fit into our culture and our team."
With summer workouts underway, Gandy has been the coach that he pledged to be for Biriuk. She wanted to be corrected, and she already feels more improvement than she expected via Gandy's detailed approach.
"She's got an infectious personality and a great perspective when you talk about somebody who had to pick up and move and still be successful," Gandy said. "When you talk about joyful people and people who are right where their feet are, she's the epitome of that.
"The way she plays and the confidence and moxie she plays with is something we're going to need. She has a fearless playing style that we need. Her ability to be able to score from all three levels is something we struggled with at times. We need people who know how to score the ball and aren't afraid to. She has the ability to embrace that role and not put too much pressure on herself."
Biriuk is among 6 million Ukranian refugees who were scattered across the globe by the Russian invasion. Through her mother's will and Americans' benevolence, Biriuk is beaming about her new home in Phoenix and teammates who she loves after forming a remarkably rapid bond.
Biriuk with mother coaching
Her sister is living with her and will enroll in high school. Her father is much closer in a Sacramento home. Their mother will move from North Carolina to Arizona soon.
The family will be reunited for the first time since they uprooted their lives amid turmoil to Bell Buckle, Tennessee, where Tsekova offered to clean homes to give back to those who had given them a new life. The Webb community could not, seeing her as a friend who they admired for sacrificing her career to find a way out of Ukraine for her daughters.
Tsekova always has been Biriuk's coach and idol, and then her mother became her hero for leading the family out of a Russian invastion.
"I was hoping we would play together like Bronny and LeBron James," Biriuk said.
Biriuk, GCU's newest guard after transferring from Ohio State, is reuniting with Lopes assistant coach Matt Shewmake, who was a stranger receiving a heart-tugging plea from a mutual acquaintance in 2022 to open a path that restored Biriuk's safety, education and basketball in America.
Biriuk, a 6-foot-1 guard, only logged 7.3 minutes per game in 20 appearances as a freshman last season. But her shooting (11 for 32 on 3-pointers) and scoring (25 points vs. Niagara and 15 points vs. Bellarmine) flashed well above her 3.3 scoring average.
