Not all dreams are created equal

Every child dreams of being Steph Curry, or Roger Federer.

No one dreams of being a wheelchair basketball player, even the best ones in the world.

In fact, everyone’s dream is literally NOT to be in a wheelchair at all. Ever. 

In a nutshell, that’s the essential difference between two very different processes of athlete development – that of an athlete with a disability, and the standard athlete development process. It’s the difference in dreams: one is dreaming of fame and glory. The other just wants to walk like all the other kids. 

The idea that athlete development is similar in athletes with and without disabilities is a common misconception. On a good day it leads to terrible waste of resources and money, and on a bad day it leads to high rates of athlete dropout and wasted opportunities for kids and adults with disabilities to walk the unique and amazing path of wheelchair and para sports.

In the world of modern thought on education and learning, it is often said that if you rely on a young child’s inner motivation to learn, you are destined to fail, and fail him or her. You are failing them because you think that their natural curiosity and perhaps their internal motivation to succeed will lead them to do their homework or read an extra chapter in the history book. But it certainly will not. 

What will, is providing them with what is referred to as scaffolding: a construction they can climb. 

If we build it, they will climb.

It may include one-on-one guidance and mentorship, it may include smaller classes and closer, more intimate relationships with their teachers, it may include hours during school dedicated to reading together, it may include finding the right role models in older students and it may also include frequent and personal recognitions of their achievements. 

Simply put, placing a child in a classroom and telling them to learn doesn’t work.

Same is true for any athlete development. It isn’t enough to provide a nice facility and some coaching hours.You need to find out why they are playing sports and what it gives them (for some it’s just a way to be out of the house), tap into their soul and find what drives them, what motivates them, and give them just that: if you do, you’ve figured out the difference between a coach and a coach for life.

However, for young people with disabilities it’s different altogether and not many get that. Not a week goes by without someone sitting in my office and telling me how we are doing it all wrong; if we just go out there (there being rehab centers and special education schools) and show them how amazing adaptive sports are and have them meet our Paralympic stars, they will flood our gates and ask us to please make them para-athletes.

If you followed my recent blog posts, you know I am currently in rehab myself, following cervical spinal surgery. The rehab hospital I am in, the Loewenstein Rehabilitation Hospital, is the best of its kind in the world, and within that best, the day rehab department which I am admitted to, is the jewel in the crown. 

Not a single patient there, whether he or she had their leg amputated, were paralyzed in a car accident, or had a stroke, dreams of a Paralympic medal. They don’t even know or care what I am talking about. They just wanna go back home to their previous normal lives.

While at the top we aspire to be perceived and treated just like any other pro athletes, at the other end, at the very beginning, the sets of challenges, motivations and dreams aren’t the same at all. Most kids or adults initially come to adaptive sports programs for rehabilitation purposes, and because their parents (or physios) think it’s important. The pull towards competitive sports is a gentle, very delicate, sometimes long and excruciating process. It’s a dance that may sometimes take years, and it can’t be done aggressively. It takes experience, specialty and genuine care and passion. 

While every child going out on the court for the first time fantasizes shooting like Curry, a child with a disability may need months to adapt to the very idea that wheelchair basketball is played, well, in a wheelchair. For their parents it may take years.

However, with patience, experience, empathy and creativity, something profound can happen. In time, a child who once resisted the idea of rolling onto the court can discover a new kind of freedom in the spin of the wheels. Gradually, he may become a teammate, a competitor, and maybe, just maybe, begin to dream new dreams.

But never forget that the greatest victory of all is when that young athlete shows up the next day, and the next.

If he or she does, it means that you have touched their souls. 

That’s where it all begins.