Stella McMillan's Facebook photo from the day she signed her collegiate letter of intent looks like many other soon-to-be college athletes. With her mom and dad smiling by her side, McMillan proudly holds an orange and blue T-shirt with "Illinois" emblazoned across the front, proudly announcing she'll spend the next four years in Champagne.
Stella McMillan announcing her intent to attend Illinois (Photo courtesy of Stella McMillan)
What you can't see in the photo, is that McMillan is in a wheelchair.
The wheelchair racer and basketball player will join a small group of athletes who play adaptive sports — for those with physical disabilities — at collegiate level.
At a few schools, including Illinois — where McMillan will play basketball, adaptive sports programs mirror big-time college athletics for able-bodied athletes. They're extremely serious, competitive athletes. They're wooed by college coaches. They travel across the country to compete against other schools, and they spend hours training and trying to balance that with academics.
And just like their able-bodied counterparts, many adaptive sports athletes go on to travel the world competing in international events. An elite few even make a lucrative career out of it.
But unlike their able-bodied counterparts, adaptive athletes don't compete under the aegis of the NCAA. There are only a handful of scholarship dollars available at a few of the schools. Most athletes don't get athletic scholarship money, though the programs try to find aid for some. Even at the adaptive athletics powerhouses – schools like Illinois, Arizona, Alabama, UW-Whitewater, and Texas-Arlington – teams are still essentially club teams.
"There's an asterisk," said Ted Fay, a professor of sport management at SUNY Cortland and a former Paralympic and Olympic ski coach. "Yeah, these are varsity-like programs. But they're still outside. Almost in, but not in the athletic department."
And while wheelchair athletes and their advocates say the number of opportunities is growing, there still remain far fewer chances for even the best athletes with disabilities to compete — and to enjoy the same benefits as their able-bodied peers.
That's tough for a guy like Dan McCoy. He's a student at the University of Pittsburgh, and one of the best sled hockey players in the nation. He's suited up for Team USA and traveled the world to play for his country, but there's no place for him to play interscholastic college sled hockey – and little or no opportunity for this elite athlete to get a college scholarship to play his sport.
Introducing @mcsled14, @TeamUSA #GritBeforeGold #Contender pic.twitter.com/WssNpdKmNN
— DICK'SSportingGoods (@DICKS) February 4, 2016
"I've won medals for the USA, and just because I'm not playing wearing the Pitt logo, I don't get a scholarship," said McCoy. "It's always in the back of my mind."
The world of college-age adaptive athletes, however, may be at the beginning of a huge change.
Last year, the board of directors of the Eastern College Athletic Conference took what might turn out to be a watershed vote for adaptive athletes. The board adopted a plan to, over time, add adaptive events to the lineup of existing able-bodied track and field meets, swimming meets, and rowing and tennis competitions. That is, wheelchair races, for example, will soon add points to the track team's overall score at ECAC meets.
The ECAC also wants to add new ways for adaptive athletes to compete in wheelchair basketball, sled hockey, a sport for the blind called goal ball, and sitting volleyball.
The conference hopes that four years from now, there will be as many as 1,000 disabled athletes competing in ECAC sports. The conference got the program off the ground with a Paralympic swimming race at its Swimming and Diving championships this spring.
Start of the women's 100 free with our para Olympians ! pic.twitter.com/DeHlxhEYfo
— ECAC Sports (@ECACSports) February 27, 2016
The NCAA will be watching to see how it goes.
"This historic action systematically includes student-athletes with disabilities in intercollegiate sports for the first time in any NCAA Division," ECAC President Dr. Kevin McGinniss said when the vote was taken. "I believe this action will allow many more students, including wounded veterans returning to college, to experience the benefits of competitive intercollegiate sports.”
Gregg Baumgarten is the national chairman of Wheelchair and Ambulatory Sports USA and the director of a major competition for youth adaptive sports athletes. He said opportunities for college competition were increasing even before the ECAC ruling, and he expects they'll continue.
"We find ourselves now where the disability sports movement is where the women's sport movement was 40 years ago," Baumgarten said.
But while access to scholarship money has often been one of the main arguments in providing equal opportunity in women's sports, Fay, who is one of the architects of the ECAC initiative, said it isn't the driving force behind trying to increase opportunity. He notes that many able-bodied athletes in a lot of "minor" sports at the NCAA level are on partial scholarships.
"Scholarships is part of the equation … but number one is creating the structure and the requirement to create opportunities," Fay said.
While the ECAC move will add new opportunities, many elite wheelchair athletes will likely continue to aspire to attend established schools like Illinois, even if their programs remain, for now, essentially club teams. McMillan will play basketball, and hopes to also compete for the storied Illini wheelchair track team – which always makes up a huge share of the USA Paralympic track team.
Signed my letter of intent to play wheelchair bball for U of I. It'll be on Comcast SportsNet at 10pm tonight pic.twitter.com/KM15Fl5itf
— Stella McMillan (@smcmill114) March 20, 2016
"If my grades maintain well, I'll be doing track (in the second) semester," McMillan said. And that could lead to bigger things.
McMillan hopes to one day follow in the tracks of one of Illinois alum who has gone on to incredible success: Tatyana McFadden. Few athletes, able-bodied or disabled, have reached the height of success as McFadden, who graduated in 2013 and became the first athlete to win the Boston, New York, Chicago and London marathons in the same year. McFadden, paralyzed from the waist down by spina bifida, went to Illinois on a full scholarship, and later competed in not just the summer Paralympics, but also the Winter games in Sochi in adaptive skiing.
Our very own @TatyanaMcFadden won her sixth @ChiMarathon! http://t.co/ahNqjsExcO pic.twitter.com/5ASGzLJNbo
— Univ. of Illinois (@Illinois_Alma) October 11, 2015
The University of Illinois was a pioneer in sports for the disabled. They started a wheelchair basketball team in the late 1940s, when World War II vets, many whom came home wounded, hit the nation's campuses.
Now, there are about 10 universities with men's wheelchair basketball teams and six women's teams competing in the National Wheelchair Basketball Association collegiate division. That's not too many more than existed a couple decades ago, though, said Fay.
"Adding one team every five years, that's not system change," he said.
Even with the ECAC's official effort, it will take time to find college-ready disabled athletes to fill teams. Fay said the hope is to have scores from wheelchair racers and swimmers count in ECAC meets within two to five years. Then, the hope is the broader NCAA will move as well.
When big time D1 NCAA track and field meets allow teams to count scores earned by disabled athletes, adaptive athletes will truly be integrated, Fay said.
"We will have finally arrived when the 800m or 1500m (wheelchair race) makes the difference between whether Oregon or Arkansas wins the NCAA track and field championship," Fay said. "That's the vision."
Athletes like McMillan really just want chances to compete at a high level, and the best among them want chances for it to be meaningful, not just a recreational pursuit, Baumgarten said.
"These kids don't want your pity and they don't want your sympathy, they're not about that," he said. "They want an opportunity."
