Kenya Sykes has known she wanted to be a certified public accountant since she was a kid.
“When I was in ninth grade my mom took us to (Washington) D.C. to see an older cousin,” the Rosedale, Queens, resident said. “I told him I liked math, and he said I should be an accountant. I looked it up when we got home.
“So I can honestly say I wanted to be an accountant most of my life,” she said. “They do make people like me.”
Sykes, 38, isn’t just an accountant. She has two masters degrees related to the field; in 2003 she earned a master’s of science in financial services from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
Four years later she earned a masters in taxation from Villanova University. If you do the math, you know that for about a year Sykes was attending both schools at the same time.
“I got into the St. Joseph’s program pretty quickly, but as I was taking it I knew it was not quite what I needed,” Sykes said. “So at I enrolled in the Villanova program at the same time.”
Her last semester at Villanova, Sykes drove to Philadelphia from New York every Wednesday to take one final course.
“I applied for graduation at Villanova and they told me I had to take one more class,” Sykes said. “I had just gotten a job at a boutique tax agency. I had to break the news to my boss that I had to leave early every other Wednesday. I’d take three trains – the New York City subway, New Jersey Transit, and the SEPTA train to Villanova. (Villanova is located northwest of Philadelphia.) I’d get home at 3 a.m. and get up and go to work the next day. I was pretty crazy!”
You can tell from all this that Sykes, who now runs her own accounting firm, KM Sykes CPA PC, is a pretty determined and directed sort. So two years ago, when she got tired of trying to find a womens’ only flag football league to play in, she and friend Diane Petrillo founded their own.
Their New York Women’s Athletic League now runs three sports leagues: flag football, which is played at Brooklyn’s Aviator Field; basketball, played outdoors at Chelsea Park in Manhattan and, later this year, Dodgeball, which will be played in a New Jersey league.
“I’m making myself tired just talking about this,” Sykes said with a grin. “But when you know something is right in your heart, you do it. If you want something, nobody is going to hand it to you.”
Sykes started playing sports when she was eight years old. Her mother, Essie Jenkins, used sports to keep Sykes and her four younger siblings off the Plant City, Fla. streets. Jenkins raised her children in a mostly single parent household. Sykes said her father died of AIDS a week before her 16th birthday.
“Instead of regular summer camps, my mom would send us to sports camps,” Sykes said. “She used sports to keep us busy. And everyone plays sports in Florida.”
Sykes ran track, and played softball and basketball at Plant City High School. For several years they were local champions. But then she didn’t play any sports at Florida A&M College, and after graduating in 1995 she was off to Minneapolis, Minn., to work for the Arthur Andersen accounting firm.
She moved to Philadelphia in 2002 to attend St. Joseph’s, and moved to New York in 2005.
“When I came up here I did not know anyone but my partner,” Sykes said. “I met a woman on the bus one day, and she said her partner had a flag football league in Inwood.”
Sykes played in that four team league, called the Final Four, for in 2006 and 2007. Petrillo also played in the league, and they would become business partners.
But the Final Four went belly up, Sykes said, leaving her and Petrillo without a place to play in 2008 and 2009.
“We decided we were tired of not playing,” Sykes said. “We said if we could not find a league to play in we would make one, something to last, where women coming into town would have a place to go and meet people.”
NYWAL was born in an “all night brainstorming session” on August 4, 2010.
Petrillo used to play for the New York Sharks, a professional women’s football team, and a contact at Floyd Bennett Field, where the Sharks played, agreed to let them use it as their host field.
Last year they started a basketball league at Chelsea Park in Manhattan, fielding four teams of 12 women each, many of them former high school and college players with a few active basketball coaches in the mix. The 2012 season starts Monday evening at Chelsea Park, located between 27th and 28th Sts. and Ninth and Tenth Aves.
They started the Dodgeball team because “Diane played and she said you didn’t need a whole lot of skill,” Sykes said. “Women have different tastes and interests, so every year we endeavor to add a new sport to the league. This is an opportunity to bring other people in.
“It started out as just wanting to play, but I found that the league is a home for people who don’t have anybody in the city,” Sykes said. “Like music brings different people together, we’re doing the same thing but through sport. It’s not a gay or straight league, it’s for everybody.”
All of the teams are for women 18 and older. The member fees — Basketball, $60, Football, $75 — includes uniforms.
For information on league seasons, locations and times, see the website, www.NYWAL.com
CORRECTION:
Last week’s column on JazzReach founder Hans Schuman should have said his grandparents met in the 1930s. The program’s group, Metta Quintet, will be perform at the Highline Ballroom June 4-6.
