To mark United Nations’ International Day for Persons with Disabilities, this blog post
is about para-sports, and how the people who play these experience networking
and community feelings both offline and online.
Last month, between 7-11 Novmber,
the Wheelchair
Basketball Federation of India (WBFI)** hosted the country’s first ever international level tournament. It had teams
from nine different countries compete and both women’s and men’s teams from
India were runners-up in their respective events.
While it wasn’t possible for me to
be present in New Delhi for this historic tournament, I have in the past had
opportunities to watch para-athletes play different sports – Wheelchair
Basketball, as well as Blind Cricket. Watching para-athletes at their training
sessions and talking to both players and coaches on the sidelines between
breaks has been instructive. These conversations have given me an understanding
of the immense transformative changes in the life of a PWD who takes up a
para-sport.
This blog post captures what I’ve
learnt so far.
The benefits of playing para-sports
are:
1. Immediate access to a network of teammates
who experience challenges similar to oneself. Life-long friendships are formed,
sometimes even professional collaborative associations.
2. There are crucial life-skills of teamwork and strategy that are picked up
when playing sports – which can then be used when finding employment and
fending for one’s livelihood.
3. In a world largely designed to exclude the needs of PWDs, players of
para-sports experience a boost in confidence and self-reliance when they travel
to various cities, participate in tournaments in different places and
experience new cultures.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, many of India’s para-sportspersons and their
coaches turned to the internet to keep in touch with each other. Virtual
training sessions and motivational webinars formed the crux of community
interaction but the challenges of internet access faced by coaches and players
who either organised or participated in such events has largely been
undocumented by mainstream media.
In the absence of in-person training, there is great value in connecting with
teammates virtually – whether it is participating together in a live-streamed
training session, exchanging healthy recipes over a common social media
platform or using an app to watch videos of past matches together in order to
analyze mistakes & prepare strategy for future play. But these are exactly
the sorts of experiences that are hard to have for a team of visually-impaired cricket
players or a basketball team comprised of wheelchair users cooped up in their
homes – more so because there is still a tendency to think of sport as a
“hobby” rather than a transformative experience that teaches physical
discipline develops strategic thinking skills and builds emotional resilience
to take wins and losses in one’s stride. This means that device usage and a
quiet space for a family member who is doing a mainstream job is prioritized
over that for the para-athlete.
And while Covid-19 lockdowns in India have come to a halt, the reality of
pre-pandemic problems of the para-sports community have come surging right
back. In-person training facilities for para-sports are often hard to secure –
for example, stadium flooring has to be conducive to wheelchairs and other
assistive mobility devices; or acoustics may need to be conducive to hearing
the rattle of the cricket ball used by players with vision difficulty; stadium
rental for regular practice sessions is difficult to book due to a lack of
funds and often rentals are by default prioritized for the training of non-para
athletes whose teams generate more revenue and therefore have the capacity to
pay.
So while para-sports teams and their
managers continue to battle for sponsorships and equal access to on-ground
training facilities, they also continue to miss out on the potential
opportunities to harness skills and foster communities online. They are
severely restricted to functioning in analogue while the broader sporting
community (and indeed the rest of the world) routinely can and does harness the
benefits of a digital life.
For instance, an internet that is
designed to ignore the needs of PWDs means that para-sportspersons find it hard
to:
1. Comfortably access information on stadium availability schedules
2. Be able to access & use virtual training modules with ease
3. Book tickets online or plan travel for tournaments
4. Keep up with sporting news
5. Participate in virtually held strategy discussion sessions with teammates
To navigate meaningful online experiences, a para-sportsperson often finds
herself/himself dependent on friends or family to access the internet & is often
at the mercy of the schedules of others.
So where do we go from here?
I made a quick list of ideas. It is by
no means exhaustive. However if you’d like to know about the power of sports to
transform the lives of PWDs, and want to learn more, here are some things you
could try to get yourself started:
- Keep in touch with para-sporting news
(start by following some social media pages here and here)
- Reach out to para-sports organisations
near you, ask to be in touch with some of the para-athletes
- Attend matches and tournaments –
observation helps you be more in tune with the challenges faced by teams.
- If your finances allow, offer to contribute to make practice sessions and
tournaments possible.
- Begin thinking about offline and
online environments and features that would make them more inclusive and
welcoming spaces for everyone.
Let’s be more conscious about how we
design our environments. As any sportsperson will tell you, when we play together
as a team, we are always better for it.
** Disclosure: I donate funds to
WBFI
This post
is a part of “International Day of Disabled Persons” blog hop hosted by Sakshi
Varma – Tripleamommy in collaboration with Bookosmia. #IDPD2022Bloghop. Access
all posts of this bloghop at https://tripleamommy.com/2022/12/02/idpd2022-lets-make-this-world-a-more-inclusive-space
