Rolling Toward a National Championship
By Brian Wasson
(This article was published in Port Folio Weekly, March 16, 1999. They hold the copyright.)
With the recent NBA basketball woes fresh in their minds, Hampton Roads sports fans may be looking for other teams to cheer. Well, consider this: there's a local basketball team, ranked number-one in the nation, which has represented Virginia Beach for nearly 30 years. The team competes on a national level, and has just returned from Chicago where they grabbed top honors in the national championships.
You could say they're on a roll, and you'd be right in more ways than one.
The team is the Sun Wheelers, the newly crowned Division II champions of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association (NWBA). The team is made up of people who are mobility challenged. They may be paralyzed, have a prosthetic limb, or be unable to run due to fallen arches. Whatever the case, these NWBA athletes take to the court in wheelchairs and play by standard NCAA rules, with a few small exceptions. For example, the ball only needs to be dribbled after two pushes of a wheel.
Jody Shiflett, president of the Sun Wheelers, has been playing with the team for the past five years. He lost the full use of his legs in an Army parachuting accident. But make no mistake: his accident did nothing to quench his desire for competition.
"I'm a big believer that anybody who's a human being wants to win," he says. "This affords me the opportunity to go out there and compete and strive to win and fulfill those needs to be a winner."
While the basketball team is the most visible and successful of the Sun Wheeler's pursuits, the organization also competes in other wheelchair sports, including road racing, track and field, and tennis. "Our ultimate goal," says Shiflett, "is to be an international powerhouse, either as a team or an individual."
Although not well known, wheelchair sports have been around since the 1940s, when returning disabled World War II veterans took to playing basketball in their wheelchairs. In the 1970s, the city of Virginia Beach brought wheelchair sports to the area and had a hand in starting the Sun Wheelers. The city still sponsors the team and several annual events, including a basketball tournament in the fall and the Virginia Beach Wheelchair Tennis Classic in May.
But wheelchair sports are not only a local phenomenon. Teams compete nationally, and those with large corporate sponsors may have budgets in the six figures. Competition has also reached the intercollegiate level, where colleges such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign fund well-respected wheelchair sports programs and actively recruit promising young athletes. Michael Frogley, Illinois' wheelchair basketball team coach, says "Strong college teams are the key to developing international athletes."
The growth in wheelchair sports has been fueled in part by advances in wheelchair design. High-tech chairs have enabled athletes to compete on a higher level, unencumbered by heavy, old-fashioned chairs. Space-age materials like titanium are used to build strong, light chairs up to the demands of competition. Much of the technology has been drawn from the bicycle racing world, with price tags to match. A high-quality racing chair can push into the thousands of dollars.
A typical wheelchair basketball game is not for the faint of heart. "When we compete it's very physical," says Shiflett. "In these team competitions, when you have these rolling things that you're on, you can get up a lot of speed and there might be contact where there's metal and flesh involved."
Wheelchair sports are often dismissed as merely being therapy. They are to a degree, says Shiflett, "but it's mostly a competition, it's just the fact that we happen to do sports using wheelchairs. [The growth of wheelchair athletics is] a validation that we're the same caliber of athletes."
"Wheelchair basketball is at a turning point," agrees Frogley. "We're switching from a rehabilitative or recreational model to a more competitive offering and a higher level of play."
But, just like with traditional sports, the therapeutic values are not to be ignored. Participants point to the value of regular exercise, not to mention the outlet for competitive needs and the feeling of camaraderie that comes with being part of a team.
Skip Wilkins, one of the Sun Wheelers' founders, say that the number of people with disabilities is staggering. "You have to get them involved with something," he says.
"There's a danger when people first get disabled. They get shut-in," agrees Shiflett. "This completely reverses that. It affords them the opportunity to get out and see people who are overcoming or have overcome the same kinds of things they're about to overcome."
One such role model is Sun Wheelers member and former Navy SEAL Carlos Moleda, who competed in and won the challenge division of Hawaii's Iron Man Triathlon, arguably one of the world's toughest triathlons.
"He set a precedent; others will try harder now," says Shiflett. "There's always someone out there achieving things who may have more hurdles to clear."
As a non-profit organization, Sun Wheelers is dedicated to raising funds
to continue to develop wheelchair sports in the area. It's a lot of hard
work, says Shiflett, but the payoff is well worth it. "I'm getting
a cardio workout twice a week, I'm traveling with people that have a common
interest, and I'm competing in a finely-tuned machine that we all put
our hearts into."
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