Shooting Some Hoops (sitting down)

At IU South Bend on Tuesday night, there was a fundraiser for our disabled student association. The fundraiser featured a wheelchair basketball game pitting a faculty/staff team against the River City Rollers, an actual wheelchair team from neighboring Mishawaka.

I was part of the faculty/staff team and wow, it is not as easy as it looks shooting baskets from a wheelchair. You can't use your body at all to push off, it's all in the upper body. As you move down the court, you have to dribble once for every two times you turn the wheels, so it is quite a workout. Some guys that are in pretty good shape were worn out by the time we were done.

How did we do against the River City Rollers? In the words of my daughter Anna, who was there to see it, "You got creamed." The game was just 20 minutes and we scored 11 points while the other team scored . . .many more. They had one kid that could just zip zip zip all over the place and then sink baskets with a sling-shot style of release.

One of my colleagues took some video of the event. I come in at just about the 7-minute mark, where I miss what will be the first of 3 missed shots during the time I played. Actually, everyone missed a lot of shots, and each time we were practically under the basket.

We did take pride in one fact, though. Before our game, the Rollers played a team made up of the IU South Bend basketball teams. They only scored 4 points the entire game, so we doubled their output.

All for a good cause, I'm told the student club sponsoring the event raised a few hundred dollars and it was a lot of fun participating.