The gymnasium in Denver’s Craig Hospital may seem a long way from Beijing, but not to Jason Regier. A defending Wheelchair Rugby national champion, Regier set out to win the Mountain Sectional Playoffs with his Denver Harlequins, who hosted top teams from Arizona, Texas, and Utah on March 14-16. “You always play at 100 percent,” Regier says of this tournament, his next-to-last before nationals and its promise of the off-season. “But,” he adds, “the guys going to Beijing have an additional mindset this weekend.”
Instead of enjoying the Denver spring when the club season ends, Regier and teammate Chance Sumner will focus solely on China, where they will represent the United States as part of the 2008 Paralympic Wheelchair Rugby Team.
Played by two four-person teams on a basketball court, Murderball (as the game was first called) was developed in Winnipeg in 1977 by people with quadriplegia who wanted an alternative to Wheelchair Basketball. Ranked from .5 to 3.5 based upon level of function, players score points by maintaining possession of the ball in their end zone, similar to scoring a try in rugby or a touchdown in American football, during a game that extends over four 8-minute periods. When Regier says that “the sport smashes stereotypes,” he is not only speaking figuratively. Players may be sent to the penalty box for making body-to-body contact, but violent chair-to-chair contact is encouraged.
Wheelchair Rugby has risen meteorically since it first came to the United States in 1979. The first international tournament took place in 1982 between Canadian and U.S. teams, and the rivalry has grown to near-epic proportions. A Paralympic exhibition sport in 1996, it became a full-medal sport in the 2000 Sydney Paralympic Games, and the trials of the U.S. Team during its campaign for gold at the 2004 Athens Paralympic Games were captured in the documentary Murderball (the U.S. Team won bronze, breaking its streak of two straight Paralympic championships).
Murderball turned U.S. Team captain Mark Zupan, a fiery and heavily-tattooed competitor, into a celebrity spokesperson and the sport into a crossover sensation. Denver’s Regier, with his degree in philosophy and soft-spoken demeanor, resembles a lower-decibel Zupan, but he wears his angular sideburns, goatee, and swagger like hard-won Wheelchair Rugby medals. Winning and hardness is what Wheelchair Rugby is all about.
Regier began practicing Wheelchair Rugby immediately after rehabbing from his spinal injury. “I just went out there for exercise,” he says. “I was the worst guy; I was so slow. And I just thought, ‘This is humbling.’” Before earning his spot on the national Wheelchair Rugby team in 2005, Regier had been cut in four previous tryouts, his last from the 2004 Paralympic team. With hard work, times changed: Regier now pushes at least five miles in his morning workout, and he handcycles another eight miles in the afternoons.
By the end of the weekend, the Harlequins punched their ticket to D1 Nationals by overcoming a tough Texas Stampede squad that featured fellow Paralympians Scott Hoggsett and Norm Lyduch (Zupan was scratched from the lineup due to illness). En route to the win, Sumner and Regier earned individual honors as Tournament MVP and Outstanding .5 Player, respectively.
Although Regier has played and won at the 2005 World Wheelchair Games in Brazil and the 2006 IWRF Wheelchair Rugby World Championships in New Zealand, he says his first Paralympics will be special. “I’m not an overly emotional guy . . . but it meant a lot,” Regier says of his selection to the 2008 Paralympic team. “It almost seemed unreachable, and to touch a piece of that,” he says, his voice dropping down a few notes, “it was pretty cool.”
USQRA Mountain Sectionals Playoffs All Tournament Team0.5 Jason Regier — Denver1.0 Norm Lyduch — Texas1.5 Steve Kearley — Pasadena2.0 Josh Johnson — Arizona2.5 Gil Garcia — San Antonio3.0 Shinichi Shimakawa — Texas3.5 Dave Nicholls — UtahSportsmanship — Brad Smith — ArizonaMVP — Chance Sumner — Denver
LinksUnited States Quad Rugby Association, http://www.quadrugby.com/
United States Paralympic Rugby, http://www.usoc.org/paralympics/rugby_teams.html
Denver Harlequins, http://quadrugby.harlequins.org/
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