USA Wheelchair Rugby coach Joe Delagrave recently named the 12 athletes on his team who will compete internationally in France and Chile.
Former Naperville resident Sarah Adam made the cut.
She was the only woman to make the cut.
If all continues to go well for the Naperville North High School graduate, she could end up at the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris. No woman has ever played in that competition.
How is she succeeding in a male-dominant sport?
“I have quite a bit of function on the court,” Adam said. “We’re all classed as quadriplegic so some of us have a little more hand function, arm function or core function.
“It’s physically hard to keep up with my make counterparts so I have to use my brain and to be able to communicate with my teammates and rely a lot on that strategy tactic component.”
Adam now lives in St. Louis and is a professor of occupational therapy art St. Louis University. She was a softball star at North and spend a year at Augustana College in Rock Island before an injury shut down her career.
As a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis in 2016, Adam was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
It was a blow to her at first, but she adapted quickly.
“I gave myself a couple of months of digesting the diagnosis and what that meant for my future,” Adam said. “But who better than an occupational therapist to help manage a disease like multiple sclerosis?”
She said she had plenty of help from people who she had helped over the years.
“I’ve been surrounded by people in the disability community through adaptive sports and through wheelchair rugby and other people who are living in chairs and doing it successfully and not letting it slow them down,” Adam said.
“They have jobs and they have families and kids and do everything, but they do it a little bit differently. Seeing that helped me because they were doing just fine and that helped me wrap my mind around it.”
Adam began competing seriously in wheelchair rugby in 2019 but COVID-19 slowed things down. She was able to return to full speed last year.
The USA team will compete in the Wheelchair Rugby Cup in Paris Oct. 13-21 and the Parapan American Games in Santiago, Chile, Nov. 17-26.
The Parapan Games will be USA Wheelchair Rugby’s first chance to qualify for the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games. A gold medal finish in Santiago will secure the team’s spot in Paris.
Following the Parapan American Games in November, USA Wheelchair Rugby will host a December selection camp at Lakeshore Foundation in Birmingham, Alabama, to determine the 2024 USA national team training squad.
“I am excited for this group of 12, who have worked tirelessly this season to learn and grow as individuals and as a unit,” Delagrave said in a news release. “We are ready to represent USA as we face tough opponents from across the Americas and we are focused on punching our ticket to the Paris 2024 Paralympics.”
Adam said rugby played by able-bodied players and wheelchair rugby are vastly different.
“It’s a mix of hockey, football and all of these different sports combined,” Adam said of her sport. “It’s the only full-contact wheelchair sport. There is a lot of high speed contact there.
“When you get to know the game a little more intimately, it’s truly a chess match and you have players with different functional mobilities and (they make) sure you are always thinking two or three steps ahead.”
Jeff Vorva is a freelance reporter for the Naperville Sun.
