The Cleveland Wheelchair Cavaliers
For the first time in two years,Will Waller felt normal.
He was playing his first game of wheelchair basketball at the Rehab Institute of Chicago in 1994 and was instantly hooked.
“I can vividly remember having this huge little-kid smile on my face as I got out on the court, just pushing up and down and feeling competitive again,” recalls Waller, now a Hudson resident.
He hadn’t moved that much since May 23, 1992 — the day he nearly lost everything. As a youth, Waller was in a gang in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood in inner-city Chicago. One night, they got into their car, and five bullets were fired at them in a drive-by shooting.
One pierced Waller’s spinal cord and rendered him paralyzed. That day, doctors delivered the news: He would never walk again. A deep depression followed.
“I was very embarrassed about not just being in the chair, but the circumstances that had put me in the chair,” Waller says.
He became so withdrawn that he physically couldn’t sit up in his wheelchair and got stiff as a board. A hospital stay and a bender with alcohol followed. Then a run-in with the law gave him a wake-up call. At the suggestion of a rehab doctor, he went to community college and joined his first wheelchair basketball team.
At over 6 feet tall, Waller sat high in his chair and was a natural. Since then, he’s become one of the sport’s top players, winning two bronze medals at the Paralympics, two world championship gold medals and National Wheelchair Basketball Association MVP. Now, he’s captain of the Cleveland Wheelchair Cavaliers, who play 35 to 40 games from October to April in local recreation centers and school gyms in Brunswick and Hudson as well as on the road. There are 16 players from Cleveland, Akron and Pennsylvania on the team.
Waller used the competitive edge he developed in the nationals to help transform the Wheelchair Cavaliers from a community recreational team into an athletic threat that won its first NWBA championship, second division, during his first full season in 2010.
That’s no easy feat. Although some may see wheelchair basketball as slow moving, longtime coach Tim Fox assures this sport takes incredible skill and upper-body strength.
“It’s fast-paced, and there’s more physicality,” Fox says.
It can be challenging for players to adapt to maneuvering the custom-built wheelchairs on a crowded court that often resembles bumper cars with chairs getting bumped and flipped.
“It’s a pretty bang-up physical game,” says Paul Zinn, a Medina resident who has been playing since 2011, after he fell off a ladder and suffered a burst fracture and permanently damaged his spinal cord.
The Wheelchair Cavaliers are serious athletes who play to win, but joining the team is more about healing for those coping with disabilities, whether it be from a recent injury or a lifelong condition.
Fox has seen that in player Darron Lewis, who lost his left leg and injured his right leg when an improvised explosive device blew up during a U.S. Army tour in Afghanistan. The devastating event left Lewis with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. But Fox has seen the sport help get Lewis out of that funk.
“You see the instability, the unsureness of himself of what he can and can’t do. Now he’s recognized in every tournament as one of those top threats,” Fox says.
Now Lewis not only has an outlet to deal with his struggles, but he also has the kind of camaraderie he found in the Army. He calls his teammates “bros” who help each other deal.
“We are one,” says the Cleveland resident who has played five seasons. “We’re all in a chair, so we all go through something.”
The team doesn’t keep these transformations to themselves. The Wheelchair Cavaliers visit local schools and hospitals to talk about overcoming disabilities. Waller even helps local eighth-graders mentor sixth-graders every Wednesday on his lunch break. The stage gets even bigger twice a year when they show 20,000 fans at Cleveland Cavaliers halftime shows their finesse in ball handling and hitting 3-pointers.
They want others to feel empowered, too. So in 2010, they established the Junior Wheelchair Cavaliers, and that led to about four area high schools getting wheelchair sports programs through Adaptive Sports Program of Ohio.
“There’s nothing more rewarding than creating opportunity for people who don’t have a lot of opportunity otherwise,” says Waller.
Waller is thankful that wheelchair basketball turned his life around. He’s come a long way from being that teen who was too embarrassed to be seen in the wheelchair. Now the charismatic jokester is a motivational speaker who shares his journey on stages throughout the area.
“If I were to tell you that prior to my chair or shortly after my chair I lacked confidence, you would think I were crazy,” Waller says. Yes, we would.