How has wheelchair basketball been adapted

Brush Up on The History of Wheelchair Basketball

World War II was over. Wounded veterans had sacrificed their glorious youth for their country and for freedom. They were alive, but some of their bodies were paralyzed and souls damaged. They wanted no sympathy or special treatment. They simply wanted the opportunity to regain their sense of wholeness and to take their rightful place in society. They did so through sport, particularly the sport of wheelchair basketball.

A book by David Davis, Wheels of Courage: How Paralyzed Veterans from World War II Invented Wheel Chair Sports, Fought for Disability Rights, and Inspired a Nation, reveals the pioneering story of the world’s first wheelchair athletes: U.S. soldiers, sailors, and Marines who were paralyzed on the battlefield during World War II. They organized the first-ever wheelchair basketball teams within V.A. hospitals after the war, which quickly spread across the nation and changed the perception and treatment of disabled people.

This book weaves the long-forgotten story of how three groups of courageous and unbreakable pioneers —paralyzed veterans from World War II; the doctors and physical therapists who created the rehabilitative treatments to keep them alive; and the educators and coaches who used sports to motivate them—came together to change their world and ours. To that point in time, wheelchair sports did not exist yet.

Enter two doctors, Ernest Bors in California and Howard Rusk in New York, who helped popularize treatments in which wounded veterans used recreation to rehabilitate their bodies and to adjust to their “new normal.” Veterans and their doctors experimented with several sports, including seated volleyball and wheelchair baseball, but none caught on until a physical education instructor at Birmingham VA hospital in Van Nuys, California, created a new sport: wheelchair basketball. That P.E. teacher, Bob Rynearson, noticed that the paralyzed veterans liked to play a crude form of pickup basketball after the non-disabled players abandoned the court. He began organizing practices for the wheelchair crew and then wrote the first set of rules for the sport.

While watching the men wheel up and down the court and jockey for position, Rynearson arrived at his most perceptive insight: that the wheelchair should be considered an extension of the athlete’s body. In this he was aided by the new-fangled wheelchair models being produced in Southern California, which the rising aviation industry had turned into an engineering capital.

Wheelchair “technology” had long been mired in Civil War-era design. Old-school chairs were all-wooden, rigid-frame models that were essentially pieces of bulky furniture, with all of the maneuverability of an aircraft carrier. That changed in the late 1930s, when engineers Herbert Everest and Harry Jennings started to fashion something more maneuverable.

The pioneering wheelchair athletes didn’t just revolutionize the possibility of sport, but their public presence also helped reduce the stigma of disability outside the gymnasium- they couldn’t possibly be considered “wheelchair-bound” or “confined to a wheelchair. ” Given the chance, they were obviously capable of doing everything non-disabled veterans could do. “In essence, these pioneering athletes marked the beginning of organized sports for individuals with all types of disabilities,” said Davis. “A movement that eventually included women and youth.”

In demonstrating that ability matters more than disability, these veterans fired the first shots in what would become the protracted fight for disability rights in this country.

NOTE: This article includes a portion of the aforementioned book and an article written by the book’s author, David Davis, a Los Angeles-based journalist.

Wheelchair Basketball – Adaptive Sports Northwest

Adaptive Sports Northwest has four wheelchair basketball teams: The Portland Wheel Blazers, The Junior Wheel Blazers and the Prep Junior Blazers, and the newly formed Portland Cascades, a women’s team comprised of both adult and junior athletes.

Wheelchair basketball is a fast-paced form of basketball. Based on the able-bodied version of the sport, most of the rules, tactics, and plays are the same: court dimensions, basket heights, number of players, playing time, shot clock, scoring, and 3 point line.

As the name of the sport implies, athletes in wheelchair basketball play from a seated position in a chair specialized for the sport. Some rules differ from the sport’s able-bodied counterpart: dribbling, traveling, and fouls all have rules specific to wheelchair basketball.

Teams play games against other teams from around the Northwest and West Coast at tournaments each year including regional cities such as Portland, Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane.

ASNW Wheelchair Basketball teams are members of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association.

Who Can Participate

Wheelchair basketball competition is open to male and female athletes with physical disabilities such as amputation/limb loss, spinal cord injury/wheelchair-users, cerebral palsy/brain injury/stroke, and other orthopedic and locomotor disabilities.

The Wheel Blazer Wheelchair Basketball program is for adults (over the age of 17).

The Junior Wheel Blazer program (Prep and Varsity teams) is for youth players from 7 – 17 years of age.

The Cascades women’s team is a combination team of female players of all ages and physical abilities, including athletes with no impairment.

Athletes must be able to follow sequential commands. All ages are welcome. Athletes need to be members of ASNW to participate in sports programming.

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Wheel Blazers (Adult)

Coaching Staff: David Brewer

Junior Wheel Blazers (Youth)

Coaching Staff: Kim Michel, Kelli Sullivan and Cassidy Jorgensen

Portland Cascades (Women)

Coaching Staff: Coaching Positions Available

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