EWU's wheelchair basketball team take on tournament competition

 

Last updated 3/14/2019 at 11:32pm

By SHANNEN TALBOT

Staff Reporter

The summer before Liam Doloughan’s senior year of high school, he was running along a trail on a cross-country trip. About three miles out, an excruciating pain in his hip stopped him in his tracks. With just three inches of movement in one leg, Doloughan was able to make it back to the team’s camp, but what would follow would change the course of his athletic future forever.

Doloughan’s hip injury led to a diagnosis of joint malformation that effectively ended his running career. Around the same time, his brother suddenly passed away, and soon Doloughan found he didn’t want to go outside and had lost interest in things he’d previously enjoyed.

Basketball changed that.

Now 21, Doloughan competes in wheelchair basketball for Eastern Washington University. Just last weekend, the team competed in the National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association’s regional tournament, making it all the way to the championship game against Team St. Luke’s.

The EWU Eagles took on ParaSport Spokane Women, winning 32-14 and eked out a win against ParaSport Spokane D3 in the semifinals 25-20, but couldn’t quite hold onto their lead in the championship round and lost to Team St. Luke’s 44-29.

Being able to return to competitive athletics shook Doloughan out of a dark time in his life, he said.

“I was not in a good head space — my brother had passed and I lost my ability to run, but basketball helped me get back into the right mental state,” Doloughan said. “It’s done wonders for me.”

Doloughan got involved in the sport nearly two years ago when the team’s president reached out to him. Originally, Doloughan didn’t think he was qualified since he could technically walk.

“I had the thought that you had to be wheelchair-bound fulltime or have a more severe disability,” he said.

The misconception that one must be wheelchair-bound to play wheelchair basketball is a common one, according to ParaSport Spokane’s executive director Teresa Skinner. Skinner has coached adaptive sports since 1995 and helped kick-start EWU’s program.

“In Spokane right now there are at least 300 people that can play adaptive sports and at least 200 of them have no idea,” Skinner said. “There’s probably 100 people at Eastern who could play and don’t know it because they don’t think of themselves as an athlete and no one ever encouraged them.”

Until the creation of the EWU program in 2017, options were limited for adaptive players in this region. The closest college program for wheelchair basketball was in Arizona.

EWU’s is the first wheelchair basketball program in the collegiate division on the West Coast, and Washington state’s only collegiate para-sports team. This year marked the first time the college had a wheelchair division in a regular tournament.

Wheelchair basketball competitors are ranked based on level of disability, with 4.5 being able-bodied and 3.5 being wheelchair-bound, Doloughan said. He is ranked at a level 4. EWU’s team consists of three ranked players and three able-bodied competitors.

“Nobody holds anything against anyone and we compete as equals,” Doloughan said. “Everybody’s got each other’s backs and they are some of the most accepting people I’ve ever met.”

The team is currently co-ed but hopefully within five years there will be enough players for a men’s and women’s team, Skinner said.

The group did a lot of scrimmaging in preparation for the tournament and worked on ball-handling, which can be difficult, Doloughan said. Dribbling while pushing a wheelchair requires intense hand-eye coordination, especially since touching chair wheels more than twice is technically travelling.

“I was very competitive and it was really hard to just be taken out of it,” Doloughan said. “Wheelchair basketball really helped my mental state and helped me be part of a team.”

To Doloughan’s mother Robyn, the sport has even more meaning.

“That program gave us our kid back,” she said.

EWU’s director of campus recreation programs and tournament organizer Mike Campitelli said he “couldn’t have been happier” with the event.

“It was incredible,” he said. “We wanted to see if there was interest in the wheelchair and unified programs, and there was. Basketball is basketball.”

Sparking that interest is the first step to creating para-sport programs across the country, according to Skinner. The U.S is hosting the ParaOlympics in 2028, and unfortunately has a reputation for not being supportive of para-sports, she said.

“I would love to change that, but the only way we’re going to do that is getting more people to come out and watch,” Skinner said. “Everyone should have the opportunity to play a sport at the collegiate level.”

Shannen Talbot can be reached at shannen@cheneyfreepress.com.

 

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