NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Matthew Reid always thought of himself as unathletic. A bilateral below-the-knee amputee, Reid, who will be a sophomore at Cheshire (Conn.) High School this fall, preferred reading books to sports.
But Wednesday, Reid, 15, was out on the basketball court at Southern Connecticut’s Moore Field House, zipping up and down with his wheelchair and mixing it up with the other wheelchair basketball players. He was participating in a camp hosted by the Ryan Martin Foundation and the school’s College of Health and Human Services’ Institute for Adapted Sports and Recreation.
After camp was over for the day, Reid talked excitedly about running track at Cheshire, which he did his freshman year, and his new pair of running blades.
“They’re going to have spikes on the bottom, so I’ll be way faster,” he said. “I can’t wait for the new season of track. I joined track last year to build my endurance for basketball.”
Martin, who grew up in Somers but now lives in Norwalk, is a former professional wheelchair basketball player who played internationally and is currently the director of adaptive sports at City University of New York. He’s always been all about providing opportunities to adaptive athletes. To that end, he would like to collaborate with the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference in some manner to identify kids like Reid and steer them toward adaptive sports programs.
“I would like them to help us disseminate information to school systems about existing programs and help us identify kids that could potentially benefit from these types of programs,” Martin said Wednesday.
“If we could identify athletes with disabilities that are in the high school system that could benefit from Paralympic sport opportunities — the state has a robust amount of opportunities from wheelchair basketball to track and field, swimming — we would love to see kids where they could excel in a sport. For example, Matthew’s favorite sport is basketball, and it would be unlikely he would play for his high school team. This offers him a complete opportunity.”
CIAC director of media relations John Holt said that the CIAC would welcome looking into a collaboration.
“With the growth of adaptive sports, it makes sense for us to consider what opportunities are out there for our student-athletes,” he said.
Reid found out about wheelchair basketball through Camp No Limits, a national nonprofit organization that sponsors camps for children with limb loss in different states.
“It was three years ago, I think, Quinnipiac hosted Camp No Limits,” Reid said. “I did sled hockey and wheelchair basketball. I loved the difficulty of it, having to wheel and dribble. I found that fascinating and different.”
Ryan Fitzpatrick, a congenital above-the-knee amputee who will be a senior at New Fairfield (Conn.) High this fall, already participated in sports (running, basketball and swimming) with a prosthetic leg before he played wheelchair basketball. Fitzpatrick, who plays in Martin’s wheelchair basketball youth program with Reid, also found out about the sport at Camp No Limits.
He’s been playing for four years and now plans to play in college and will choose among CUNY, the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
“That’s the goal, to play wheelchair basketball in college,” Fitzpatrick said. “I never thought I’d be given money to play my favorite thing, which is basketball, so it’s opened up a lot of opportunities.”
Both Fitzpatrick and Reid said they had never considered playing wheelchair basketball before going to Camp No Limits.
Reid never heard of it. Fitzpatrick had heard of the sport from a former player who told him about it where he got his prosthetic legs made.
“I was so young,” he said. “I was always running around with a soccer ball. I was like 6. I wasn’t really thinking about wheelchair basketball.
“Now I’m always trying to spread awareness about it.”
