The Olympics are nearly halfway over, but later this month, another set of athletes will compete at the Parisian arenas and venues — at the Paralympics.
For wheelchair users specifically, the opportunity to play sports not only opens the door for gold, it also boosts the chances for employment, but many barriers are in the way.
Three-time former Paralympian Renée Tyree was not always a wheelchair user. She was paralyzed in the 1980s at 19 after an illness. Her previous sports participation ended and she moved from Wisconsin to attend the University of Arizona to pursue a new life.
“When I became a chair user, I hadn't really initially thought about sports but was exposed to it,” Tyree said
UA’s Adaptive Athletics program was smaller back then, and Tyree to this day credits it and sports for helping with her career success.
“The position that I have now is with Encompass Health. I’m a regional director of pharmacy and I oversee the operations for 18 hospitals with regard to pharmacy,” Tyree said.
For context, the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center says immediately after an injury, employment drops from 65% to 18%. That figure never recovers; at best it improves to just under the halfway point some decades later.
As for what sports has to do with careers, according to a 2015 study — which is the latest on the correlation – depending on how long a wheelchair user participates in adaptive sports, they could see about a 40 percent increase in employment likelihood. (An approximate 4% increase for each additional year of adaptive sport — up to 10 years).
And Tyree is not surprised. Much of her sports career was wheelchair basketball.
“You’re getting stronger, you’re more confident in your body and mechanics. Your mental abilities, strategies, all of these things are built and developed and you gain these skills that definitely correlate and translate in confidence into a career and being able to advocate for yourself,” Tyree said.
Michael Cottingham is one of the researchers from the 2015 study. He says one of the other factors for low employment are structural barriers that risk some wheelchair users losing their healthcare benefits.
“If you get employed enough that you no longer qualify for public service like for Medicare/Medicaid, but you are not at the point where you are getting insurance through your employer, because maybe you’re an hourly employee, or maybe you’re just not given that benefit or maybe it’s just cost prohibitive for you, you really can’t justify going back to work fulltime,” Cottingham said.
But adaptive sports has increasingly become a pathway to a degree.
Dustin Stallberg competes on UA’s wheelchair racing team. Back in May at a competition he talked about the impact of scholarships.
“Oh it’s huge. College is really expensive and a lot of us have huge medical bills or even a chair like this just costs a whole lot of money. It’s like a big lift financially. It helps financially to help offset the costs of just having a disability. And it’s amazing. We wouldn’t be here without the scholarships,” Stallberg said.
He’s on scholarship at UA, which is one of 23 colleges offering adaptive sports programs in the country.
Before that he was in a wheelchair basketball program in Houston, won two national championships, but never thought college was possible until a coach encouraged him.
“I got a scholarship offer signed for wheelchair basketball and track. I eventually dropped basketball because I fell in love with racing and here I am,” Stallberg said.
But there’s another barrier to joining adaptive sports: the equipment is expensive, and for the most part, not covered by insurance.
The San Diego Foundation says it’s considered to be a “luxury” item.
That’s where the Challenged Athletes Foundation comes into play. Here’s co-founder Bob Babbitt.
“The equipment we were buying back in the day was $3,000, $5,000 pieces of equipment. A power soccer chair is $10,000,” Babbitt said
Over 30 years, CAF has raised over $178 million to provide grants to eligible athletes, professional or otherwise, to help pay for equipment.
“Don’t ever underestimate the power of sport,” Babbitt said “Sport, when you have an accident of some sort, it can help you avoid that spiraling depression by having a new goal. You might be a different person now because of what you went through but being a different person and finding a different sport doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. Because all of a sudden you were never considered to be an Olympic athlete but a lot of our athletes go on to win multiple gold medals at the Paralympics.”
