ATHLETICS

High Hoops

Mizzou’s wheelchair basketball team zooms around the shiny wood floors of the Student Recreation Complex in $3,000, custom-built chairs with yellow spokes. A faint smell of burnt rubber rises from the court as wheelchairs spin donuts almost too quick to see.

Head Coach Steve Paxton wants his team to grow as quickly as it traverses the court. His plan: to build his program from nothing to a national champion.

This is a tall order for a team that didn’t even exist until 2001, when Missouri Sen. Chuck Graham, D-District 19, then chair of the education appropriations committee in the Missouri House of Representatives, allocated $190,000 of a state budget surplus to fund Mizzou's wheelchair basketball program.

The sport isn't sanctioned by the NCAA — “yet,” Paxton says. Nevertheless, the team still follows NCAA guidelines, from recruiting to study hours. Paxton nudges his players through 6 a.m. drills and scrimmages, afternoon strength training sessions and cardio workouts. “We have all the resources here to be an extremely successful program,” Paxton says. “Now it’s just us developing it further.”

'You play?'

When Paxton arrived at Mizzou in March 2004, the wheelchair basketball club had no members. He would stop every student he saw on campus in a manual wheelchair and ask, “You play ball?”

That’s how Paxton recruited Tom Knaus of Sedalia, Mo., a sophomore majoring in business. When Paxton cornered him in a campus parking lot, Knaus had been paralyzed only nine months. The former high school football player had broken his neck falling off a deck.

By the team's official debut in fall 2005, the roster numbered five. Every player played every minute of every game because Paxton had no substitutes. They played while injured and with broken chairs. The game, which follows the same rules as regular basketball, can be brutal: high-speed collisions and spills are common. Their Per4Max chairs are equipped with fifth wheels designed to keep them from tipping. (They don't always work.)

During the Tiger Wheelchair Basketball Classic March 10–11, Paxton's team rashed and skidded its way to a 68-59 win over the Edmonds ( Wash.) Community College Rolling Tritons. One Triton player spent several agonizing moments lying motionless under his chair, face smashed against the wood, before gingerly righting himself to the relieved applause of spectators.

The game is action-packed, even without slam dunks. With a regulation-height hoop and players securely strapped into low-slung chairs, it takes incredible upper-body strength to lob the ball into the net. Still, players and spectators alike seem ebullient that the game is happening at all. “I never dreamed it would be like this,” said Barbara Scotten, BS Ed '51, who is thrilled to see her athletic grandson back in action. “Tom (Knaus) is so lucky.”

Building a team

After a last-place finish in the Central Intercollegiate Division of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association in 2006, Paxton spent the off-season traveling to junior tournaments and wheelchair basketball camps around the country, searching for recruits. Unlike other coaches, “I can’t just go to any old high school,” Paxton says. Nonetheless, Paxton has built the team quickly. By the fall of 2006, he had 10 players and scholarship money to recruit five more. He encouraged Columbia's White Knight transportation company to buy a new accessible charter bus to ferry the team to tournaments in style.

As the team finishes its second competitive season with a record of 8-24, Paxton's plans keep expanding. He wants to launch a booster club and host summer camps to build enthusiasm. More than anything, he doesn’t just want to be a new program — he wants to win.

Still, for the players, “There's a lot more to it than just coming here and playing ball,” says Paxton. “They're out there having to live with this disability every day. It's not just about basketball. There’s a huge social benefit to being on the team.”

Paxton says the team helps educate the public about people with disabilities while the players support each other through the challenges of navigating college life in a wheelchair. “It's the same thing my teammates did for me,” Paxton says. “This is my opportunity to find the meaning in it.”

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Last Update: November 15, 2007