Got Game
Disabled student-athletes are ready to compete and say they can do without public admiration.
Mary Allison Milford’s life sounds like that of a typical college athlete. At least, it does on the surface. Three-hour workouts five days a week, long bus rides to weekend games in other states and keeping up with her studies are all part of life for the University of Alabama student.
But unlike many of the Crimson Tide’s able-bodied athletes, it’s up to Milford and her wheelchair basketball teammates to raise some of the money for tournament fees and travel costs. Why? Because the shoestring budget of the university’s disabled sports program doesn’t cover everything. In collegiate disabled sports, that problem is more common than not.
Around the country, disabled sports are often treated like second-class siblings to their able-bodied counterparts, largely because the latter bring in prestigious tournaments and bowl games, lucrative TV contracts and national exposure for top athletes and coaches. Furthermore, most college coaches have little or no experience handling entire teams of people with disabilities, and they are intimidated at the prospect, disability advocates say. Some are so ill-informed, for instance, that they fear that wheelchairs will ruin basketball courts or that students with impairments are too fragile for sports. And because disabled people are so sparsely distributed in the general population, it is more difficult for them to organize and demand inclusion.
Consequently, disabled sports programs like Alabama’s are few and far between. Only 11 universities offer disabled sports on a varsity level, with wheelchair basketball among the most common. Funding is tenuous, forcing the athletes to raise money themselves. They generally don’t have dedicated game and practice facilities, but instead must share space with campus recreational and intramural teams, meaning older, lower-quality facilities compared to the high-dollar, state-of-the-art arenas and gyms that able-bodied varsity athletes enjoy.
Teams for the disabled also typically don’t have access to the fancy dining halls, locker rooms and other campus amenities available to able-bodied athletes. Scholarships exist, but in smaller numbers and amounts than those for the able-bodied. None of the disabled sports programs are even governed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. A spokeswoman says the NCAA has no policy on disabled sports because universities have not requested one.
The lack of opportunity, not to mention lack of respect, frustrates Milford, her peers and their advocates.
“Disabled sports are often viewed by the able-bodied public as cultural get-togethers,” says Eli A. Wolff, project director of the Disability in Sport program at Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society. “They aren’t viewed as real sport activity.”
