Sacramento State students learned to play basketball in a whole new way Nov. 22 at the first 3-on-3 wheelchair basketball tournament on campus.

The Adaptive Sports and Recreation Club organized the event to raise awareness of sports and recreation for people with disabilities on campus. The wheelchair basketball tournament was the first major sports event put on by the club.

Donisha Harrison, senior therapeutic recreation major, said she participated in the event because she wanted to know what it was like to play basketball in a wheelchair.

“I will be working with individuals with disabilities and also will be putting on events like this in the future, so this is my chance to be in it and actually have fun,” Harrison said.

Harrison was on a team with two other able-bodied players, junior therapeutic recreation majors Nathan Lamaster and Alan Rikala. Their team, called the Mighty Ballers, played its first game against a team with Jessica Radmilovic, a member of the U.S. National Women’s Wheelchair Basketball Team.

Rikala said playing against a paralympic player made him nervous. He said wheelchair users who play basketball regularly have an advantage in the tournament. Harrison agreed.

“I feel like they’re like the Michael Jordans already in this, especially because they’ve already done it before,” Harrison said. “This is just something I’m partaking in for a day whereas they live it.”

Radmilovic, however, said the game is all about having fun.

“It’s not really a competitive thing, but more like an awareness and having fun and just learning how to play the sport,” she said.

Radmilovic said she was impressed with how many people participated in the event.

Besides the 13 teams signed up to play in the event, about a dozen friends and family members came out to watch the games and cheer for their favorite players.

“It’s all kinds of different people. There’s people from Amador County that came here, there’s people from Sacramento, there’s people from the Bay Area that showed up, so it came out to be a pretty good event,” Radmilovic said.

The goal of the event was to unite students with disabilities and students without disabilities through sports, said Devon Saul, president of the Adaptive Sports and Recreation Club and graduate student in recreation, parks and tourism administration.

“Yeah, it’s adaptive sports for students with disabilities, but able-bodied students are participating as well and I think that’s great,” Saul said. “That’s really what I think will set this program apart is that we are inclusive with everybody.”

Saul said he started the club to give students with disabilities the opportunity to participate in leisure activities that would otherwise be inaccessible to them.

Having transferred to Sac State from Texas, Saul said he was disappointed to find out Sac State did not have an adaptive sports and recreation program on campus.

“So basically I took it upon myself and said, if I’m gonna pay my rec sports fees like every other student, I think I should get some sort of rec sports thing and so I created the club,” Saul said.

Seeing the success of the wheelchair basketball tournament, the Adaptive Sports and Recreation Club plans to organize more events like it.

Saul said the club wants to organize an all-sports day, which will feature all types of adaptive sports and provide information about adaptive camps and activities. The Adaptive Sports and Recreation Club is also planning a ski trip, a rugby tournament and a hockey event.

David Van Brunt, a Sac State graduate who participated in the basketball tournament, said it is great to see a new awareness of adaptive sports on campus.

“There’s only so many people in chairs in the world and not many of them play sports, so the more people that get into chairs, the more opportunities we have to play,” Van Brunt said.

The game of wheelchair basketball isn’t much different from regular basketball except the fact you won’t see anyone doing a slam dunk, said Steve Hornsey, program director for Access Leisure, a branch of Sacramento’s Department of Parks and Recreation, which provided a total of 14 wheelchairs for the event.

“The major difference is there’s no double-dribble and so the dribbling rule is you get two pushes between each bounce of the ball,” Hornsey said.

Hornsey said he would like to see more events like the wheelchair basketball tournament at Sac State.

“The more notoriety, the more aware people are of programs like this or events like this, the more they see that people with disabilities aren’t just the guy sitting in a wheelchair, but they’re active and they’re having fun and they’re people too,” Hornsey said.

Inna Gritsak can be reached at [email protected].