Wheelchair Basketball Adaptive Sports Lab with Lone Star Paralysis Foundation – USAHS OT Programs
Occupational Therapy students at the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences (USAHS) Austin campus get firsthand experience with adaptive sports through a wheelchair basketball lab with the Lone Star Paralysis Foundation. The nonprofit, which supports people living with spinal cord injuries, has partnered with USAHS for more than eight years.
For people living with spinal cord injuries, adaptive sports can be about much more than physical activity. They can create opportunities to build strength, regain confidence, reconnect with others, and discover new ways to participate in the community.
The experience gives OT students a different perspective on rehabilitation and community reintegration. They see how the skills developed in clinical settings can carry into everyday activities and meaningful experiences outside of traditional therapy.
Transcript
Wheelchair Basketball Adaptive Sports Lab with Lone Star Paralysis Foundation – USAHS OT Programs
[00:00:00] Ryan Sproull (Lone Star Paralysis): So today we bring students out, we play wheelchair basketball. [00:00:08] Christopher Ebner (OT Faculty): We have some of our community partners, at Lone Star Paralysis, couple of good friends of ours, Ryan and Joe, been coming out and helping us out for the last eight years. Had a group of students come out today, learning more about the, utilization and impact, that, adaptive sports can have in the lives of our clients. [00:00:22] Christopher Ebner (OT Faculty): So Lone Star Paralysis is a community organization, non-profit organization that takes care of the needs of those individuals that have sustained spinal cord injuries in terms of getting back into the community, getting involved back in adaptive sports. [00:00:34] Ryan Sproull (Lone Star Paralysis): So it’s cool to get them out, show them kind of the different world of wheelchair ball, and show that adaptive sports, for a lot of people in our community, it’s very important and a part of our lifestyle. [00:00:44] Ryan Sproull (Lone Star Paralysis): It’s a big part of, of what we do and how we stay involved. And not only keeping people that have been disabled for an extended period of time, but getting people that are new to the community out and involved, and show them a little bit of independence from this perspective, which translates to their everyday independence. [00:01:02] Christopher Ebner (OT Faculty): Well, adaptive sports, I always preach to the students that this is a rehab multiplier in the sense that, all those things that we work on collectively as occupational physical therapists on a day-to-day basis in that clinical environment, all those things can be enhanced and achieved, through these type of experiences. [00:01:18] Ryan Sproull (Lone Star Paralysis): For me, when I started playing adaptive sports, it just opened my eyes to a whole different world. For the students, it’s, you can’t be afraid to tell people to come out. You gotta push it a little bit. We try to push to challenge their patients and make sure that independence is not that far away, because it’s, you know, it’s very important. [00:01:40] Ryan Sproull (Lone Star Paralysis): People sometimes don’t ever think that independence is gonna be part of their goal, but they’re very capable to do it. It’s just they gotta have a little push. [00:01:47] Riley Guzzino (OT Student): So being able to come out here and, like, experience and make connections with people who are, like, actually going through these things, it’s, it’s really important for us. [00:01:56] Christopher Ebner (OT Faculty): So hopefully these students today, I’m sure every one of them got the impact that these can potentially have going forward, taking them into their clinical field work and into clinical practice, and they need to remember these type of experiences in terms of the impact it can have in the individual lives of our clients.
