Sacramento State, in cooperation with the City of Sacramento Department of Parks and Recreation’s Access Leisure, hosted the first ever Wheelchair Rugby Exhibition on Saturday. The River City Wreckers and the Reno Big Horns took to the Hornets Nest at Yosemite Hall to play a friendly double-header exhibition, with a three-hour intermission in between games to invite spectators to try out the sport.

Having been brought out of a hiatus just over a year ago by Devon Saul, a former member of the four-time national Quad Rugby champions, the Texas State Stampedes, the River City Wreckers had trouble keeping pace with the veteran members of the Reno Big Horns. The Big Horns took the first game 34-29 and ended the second game 30-23.

For the uninitiated, Quad Rugby, or more affectionately known by its original name of Murderball by players and aficionados of the sport, is a hybrid cross of basketball and hockey played with specially modified wheelchairs and an overinflated volleyball. The premise of the game is simple: The person carrying the ball in his or her lap must touch at least two of his or her wheels inside the goal of the opposing team by using whatever means necessary short of reaching out and striking another player.

Each team is allowed to field four members at a time with a special limitation on the players fielded based on a point system according to the range of disabilities a player has. According to official Quad Rugby rules, a player must have an impairment in three out of four limbs to be recognized as a player. A person with less-hindering disabilities is awarded more points than others with more hindering disabilities, but a team’s fielded total may not exceed an eight-point limit to prevent unfair match-ups.

According to the game program detailing the history of the sport, Quad Rugby “was developed by three Canadians from Winnipeg, Manitoba, as a quadriplegic equivalent to wheelchair basketball.” Before officially changing the name of the sport to Quad Rugby, it was first called Murderball “due to the aggressive nature of the game.”

“The great thing about this sport is that when you tell somebody you play wheelchair rugby, they say, ‘It sounds tough,’ or, ‘That’s awesome,’ but they don’t understand how intense the game is,” Saul said.

One has to see the game in action to understand it. The intensity of the game can be felt in the earth-shaking sound of players hurling their 30-pound, solid aluminum, specially welded battle chairs into each other with enough reckless abandon to sometimes flip the five-wheeled monstrosities over and cause concussions and broken ribs to be relatively common injuries within the game.

“Oh, just put some tape on it and get back in there. You can never miss a beat,” Allen “Al” Seals of the Reno Big Horns said. Seals was one of the original founders of the Big Horns when the team was formed in 1992. Throughout his career, the veteran Quad Rugby player said that he has suffered three concussions and had broken every toe on his feet.

But no matter what’s broken, on the field every Quad Rugby player can always count on two things that exist in massive abundance to patch things up: duct tape and the feeling of camaraderie every player feels for one another.

“We have a huge commonality,” Seals said.

Many of the players can relate to one another because of their shared experiences as quadriplegics. But no matter the range of symptoms, when playing Quad Rugby, Seals and Saul believe that disabilities don’t count for much on the field.

The only real difference between players is the heart they bring into the game.

Saul, who played with the United States Olympic Quad Rugby teams from 2003-2007 as a member of their trainer team, has dreams and aspirations of one day being a part of that team.

“I’ll get a gold medal or I’ll die trying,” he said.

Saul moved to Sacramento a year ago after receiving a bachelor’s degree in recreation administration from Texas State University. He currently attends Sac State and is working to attain a master’s degree in the subject in addition to helping rebuild the River City Wreckers in his spare time. He intends to pursue a doctorate’s in the future and a career in teaching children.

Unlike the Big Horns, the Wreckers are not yet a part of the United States Quad Rugby Association that features 36 teams and 450 active players. But both sides have been talking about merging the two teams together due to the recent difficulty the Big Horns have been having in trying to find members, something that Seals believes to be a good thing in a different way.

Shortly after the sport’s creation, he said that America was at the forefront of a Quad Rugby explosion that saw the sport become “the fastest growing wheelchair sport in the world today” and drew world-wide acclaim. Seals said that during the time when he was on the U.S. National Team, he used to play at packed standing-room only stadium games in Sydney, Australia.

But as America is at the forefront of Quad Rugby’s international advances, so too is it in the advancement of medicine. Seals said he thankfully attributes the scarcity of new players to improved medical techniques to save victims from permanent paralysis. As to the future of the sport, he only had one thing to say.

“I’ll keep playing so long as I can push a chair. I’m 48 years old, but I love this sport,” he said.

Justin Tejada can be reached at [email protected]