Wheelchair athlete sees light in the darkness

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This article was published 27/11/2017 (3203 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s amazing when people can see light in times of darkness; making the most of difficult situations. Bethany Johnson, a 16-year-old Grade 11 student at Collège Churchill is the perfect example.  

This January, Bethany will travel to Toronto to train at the National Wheelchair Basketball Academy for one week. Although Bethany is still very young in her sport she was contacted by Michael Frogley (a very successful wheelchair basketball player and now director of the National Academy) and was invited to train with the university level athletes.

Bethany is excited for the occasion.

“The week itself is an opportunity to try training at a high level with the national team and also to check out different universities in the Toronto area to see if I’m interested in attending one in the future,” she said.

Canada doesn’t have a university-level wheelchair basketball league so Bethany has been considering the possibility of attending a U.S. college. The University of Alabama is high on her list because the history of the program shows significant growth in wheelchair basketball, it produces highly successful players with its “coach as you play” philosophy and it is one of the only colleges that offers full scholarships to wheelchair athletes.

Speaking of scholarships, Bethany applied for and was awarded a $5,000 grant from the Champions Fund towards her very own, specialized wheelchair basketball chair, which will allow her to return her rental chair to her club for another athlete to use. 

Bethany hasn’t always been a wheelchair athlete and her story explains the type of character needed to see the positive in a dark situation. 

Near the end of her Grade 7 year, she began feeling a strange pain in her hip area.  She was eventually diagnosed with “slipped capital femoral epiphysis,” or SCFE for short. This means that the ball-shaped head of the femur bone slips from the hip joint and is unable to fuse in the necessary place resulting in limited mobility and much pain and discomfort.

Two subsequent surgeries, with more to come have prevented her situation from getting worse, as both her femurs have now been surgically pinned to her pelvis and fused. This allows Bethany functional movement, but limits her ability to play sports as an able-bodied athlete.  Over the past three-and-a-half years, Bethany has faced the struggles and seized the opportunities that have presented themselves.

Bethany had the opportunity to try wheelchair basketball in phys-ed class at school and her physiotherapist strongly recommended she try the sport. He directed her to Manitoba’s Canada Games team and she began practising with them immediately.

As Bethany got her feet wet, so to speak, she practised with the team once a week and now plays three times per week. Bethany practised with this team (whose players are 23 and under) for just over two years, until she was finally able to compete in official, refereed games. Last April, she played at a tournament in Lethbridge, Alta., with Manitoba’s club team (including participants of all ages).

The very next weekend, Bethany was recruited by the Saskatchewan women’s team coach, Katie Miyazaki, to play in a Western Women’s club team round-robin tournament.  

Bethany played well and was then invited to join the Saskatchewan women’s team at the 2017 National Championships in Burlington, Ont. She has since been invited back as a regular Saskatchewan athlete, as Manitoba simply does not have enough female athletes to put together a competitive team.

With Team Saskatchewan she will play a minimum of two tournaments each year across Canada. As a member of the co-ed junior Manitoba team, she will be play in an upcoming western provincial tournament in Saskatoon this December and the Canadian Wheelchair Basketball League championships in Montreal in March. With Team Saskatchewan, she will play in the women’s CWBL championships in Vancouver in April.

Bethany attends two or three camps in Toronto each year as part of the national U25 program. She aspires to make the U25 team for the 2019 world championship.

If you know someone who might want to get involved in wheelchair sports, contact Sam Unrau at the Manitoba Wheelchair Sport Association by emailing mwsa@sportmanitoba.ca. They are actively recruiting athletes of all ages, especially women and girls.

More information and a cool video of Bethany in action can be found at https://www.womenchampions.ca/champions-fund/recipients

Dan Sylvestre is a teacher at Collège Churchill High School and a community correspondent for Fort Rouge.