Inside the Camden Community Center gym on a Monday night, the sounds are familiar.
The thud-thud of dribbling basketballs, the shouts for the ball to be passed and the swish of the net—but the squeaky sound of shoes on the court is missing. In its place is a rolling whoosh from 20 or more wheelchairs, and on the sideline, the hum of an air compressor inflating wheelchair tires.
In the last few months, the Camden center has drawn a few dozen players of various skill levels from around the South Bay. The men and women range from former international players to people just looking for a pickup game.
Most of them know each other by now, and as they swap their everyday wheelchairs for their lighter, stronger sports chairs, the enthusiasm spills out and the stress of the day melts from their faces.
“I’m so eager to play, man. I don’t want to do drills, I just want to play!” one player says to another as he gets ready.
Injuries from sports, car accidents, military service and dozens of other things put them in a wheelchair, and others have had disabilities from a young age.
Rod Williams, who won a gold medal in the 1988 Paralympics in Seoul, South Korea, is one reason the Camden center has grown so popular. Williams is a player and assistant coach of the new San Jose Spokes, a traveling team that is training for a national tournament in April in Denver. He played for many years with the Golden State Warriors-sponsored Road Warriors team in Santa Clara, and started contacting players last summer to form the less competitive Spokes team.
“There were many people who wanted to play with the Road Warriors, but their skills weren’t at that level,” Williams said recently. “I wanted to get more people to play … and now the turnout is great and I really like all the new people out there getting involved in sports,” Williams said.
Unlike most of the players whose injuries put them in a wheelchair, Williams had polio as a baby, and only recently has he used a wheelchair outside of sports. Now 59, he works as a medical biochemist at the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs hospital and lives in Los Gatos.
The San Jose Spokes have been revived from a team called the Spokes that played in San Jose in the 1970s. Williams is also a founding member of the San Jose Spinners, another ’70s team.
On Monday practices at the Camden Center, 30-year-old Adam Elix can be found chasing stray balls and swinging the string of a referee’s whistle on his fingers.
Elix, who is not disabled, is the team’s head coach, and he’s definitely cut out of for the job.
He’s been around disabled sports his entire life.
Elix’s father injured his legs in a parachuting accident in 1973, and a few years later he played on the U.S. Paralympic basketball team. He now plays for the Spokes. Elix’s mother, a quadrapalegic, was also an athlete before she died five years ago.
“Ever since I was a kid I can remember going to tournaments,” Elix said. He estimates he has been to 150 to 200 wheelchair basketball tournaments, and if there aren’t enough players at a practice, he’ll jump in a chair and play himself.
Elix is also a therapeutic specialist for the city of San Jose and is finishing his degree in kinesiology at San Jose State University. His emphasis: adapted physical activity.
With all new players, Elix said, “We tell them that there is life after your injury. It might not get better, but it will get easier.”
As the Spokes ran half-court drills on a recent Monday night, Elix pointed out Lee Williamson, another Spokes player who works at the Camden center. He’s one of the success stories of wheelchair basketball.
Williamson was injured in a drunken driving accident in 1991, and rehabilitated in Vallejo with Rod Williams. Williams got him shooting hoops and kept calling him to come play tennis and basketball.
“It allowed me to be comfortable with my disability, and now that’s what I do. I help people do it and recover from their injury,” said Williamson. Obviously grateful, Williamson sometimes jokes that he’s “Rod Williams’ son.”
These days, Williamson often talks to recently injured patients from Valley Medical Center and takes them out on the basketball court.
The Camden center keeps 10 sports wheelchairs on hand for newbies.
“It’s great to get that person out there for the first time. They’re in this dump truck with their regular chair, and then they’re in this Corvette. You just see their eyes light up,” Williamson said.
The Spokes players all have custom sports chairs with angled wheels, snowboard-like straps, and a rear wheel and axle to stabilize the chair when the player shoots.
The chairs weigh 17 to 24 pounds (compared with the 50-pound chairs of the 1970s), and they typically cost $1,500 to $3,000.
To offset some costs, Williamson is sponsored by Texas-based Per4Max, a maker of sports and everyday wheelchairs. The Spokes are sponsored by the Bay Area & Western Paralyzed Veterans of America and Campbell-based Monster Mechanical, a piping, heating and cooling company.
The chairs also have guards in front of the feet, which is good because they can get scuffed up in competition. First-time spectators are often taken aback by the intensity on the court, Spokes coaches said.
“The intensity doesn’t diminish; sometimes it gets worse!” Elix said with a laugh. “We were in a tournament in L.A., and I saw two guys get into a brawl on the court,” Elix said.
For Lee Williamson, the sport has helped open his eyes to the new possibilities for the disabled, and it’s helped change some perceptions of spectators.
“I definitely think that wheelchair sports can help so many people. … It changes what somebody thinks of a person with a disability. That’s one of my purposes in life: To let people know what they’re capable of doing.”
Wheelchair donations
The Camden Community Center is collecting wheelchairs in February for the Mexico-based World Access Project, which delivers wheelchairs to disabled people in foreign countries. Organizers are looking for used or new “everyday” wheelchairs, not hospital wheelchairs, and they can be dropped off at the center. For more information, call Lee Williamson at 408.369.6438 or visit www.worldaccessproject.org.