By: Tim Donahue
I played year-round between summer and school basketball teams for about five years of my life, and during that time, the sport turned into a large part of the way I identified myself. I ran myself ragged in those days, sometimes I’d play eight to ten games in one weekend. I’d be a sluggish, nervous wreck all week at school, and still I’d force myself out to another tournament the next week.
Basketball was all I thought about back then, to the point where I mapped out a whole future in accordance with my success in the sport, and the pressure mounted until it pushed me to my breaking point.
I quit AAU and my anxiety forced me to give up on the sport I loved, so the entire map of my future was scrapped. Sometimes I don’t even like looking at a basketball, so my trip to play wheelchair basketball along with Western’s Adaptive Sports Club was not an entirely light one to take.
The Adaptive Sports Club meets in the middle of the court. Shayna Dumont // Wavelength
Angela Romeo is the current President of the Adaptive Sports Club, and would also serve as my guide into the world of wheelchair basketball. She helped me get strapped into the chair, taught me how to ratchet down on my waist strap, and locked me in. Along my side, she also taught some of the folks on the Men’s Hockey team as they participated in the event; endless in her patience and intentional about the atmosphere she created.
Angela established a balance between the group’s fun and focus on the sport, doing effortlessly what many basketball coaches try and fail to do in decades of leadership. Step-by-step, she helped me into position with my feet tucked and hips strapped tight to the back of my chair. She personally made sure that each of us was safe, and only then were we ready to move.
The skill gap between the regular club members and us visitors announced itself when we started to move. While the more consistent members were pushing circles around me, I smiled and found that I could enjoy myself in-spite of the bubbling competitive streak that I was feeling for the first time in years. It was the atmosphere that allowed me to grant myself the patience I needed to reenter the world of the sport without my old anxieties — it was a grace that I never used to allow for myself. The other athletes were just as gracious in superiority as they were in guidance, and after a while, I found that I could maintain a good speed without losing control!
We practiced our passing, and in our second warm up we pulled like a snake around the perimeter of the gym. Each athlete held onto a bar of the wheelchair in front of them, and one person tried to wheel around the whole court to tag the last chair before the group of connected chairs managed to pull in a complete circle around the court. Once the last chair got tagged, the first person would pull off from the group and become the next tagger, and the front athlete had to pull the weight of all of the chairs behind them. It was an upper-body relay warmup, and I’m still feeling the soreness in my back and shoulders.
The second warm up exercise where Tim is pushing everyone on the left, and on the right, a photo is taken of everyone participating in this exercise. Shayna Dumont // Wavelength
Soon after my arms officially liquified, we moved on to the real game. We divided into teams and played with a delicate balance that juggled levity and competition, in a harmony that had once seemed impossible. Above everything else, this was a learning experience. I was getting lapped in our runs, airballing shots that I’d like to think I’d make in my sleep, and my entire body ached in places that I thought were impossible to exercise.
Three years ago — in the peak of my high school athlete’s brand of self-seriousness — I would’ve been furious, beyond frustrated with myself and the failure to live up to the standards that I’d spent my entire youth setting. For a long time, basketball was something that I couldn’t even play in the front yard without breaking a sweat and really clenching my teeth to meet the painstaking quota of “a good practice.” That attitude could never have flown with the Adaptive Sports Club, we were too busy having fun.
Folks playing wheelchair basketball on the court. Shayna Dumont // Wavelength
Last Thursday my team lost, I got left in the dust, and I missed just about every shot that wasn’t given to me out of pity. Every athletic aspect that I’d once identified with evaporated, and I was a liability on that court. Once I would’ve been miserable, I would have left with my head hung low, overanalyzing and critiquing each of my failures as if they were bullet wounds. Previously, my identification as an athlete could have torn me apart, but with support from the Adaptive Sports Club, I couldn’t stop smiling.
Check out the Adaptive Sports Club:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wwu_wheelball/
WIN: https://win.wwu.edu/organization/whee…
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wwuwheelball