Active Summer Fun: 'I enjoy playing sport as part of a team'
A new participation campaign created by the English Federation of Disability Sport (EFDS) and National Disability Sport Organisations (NDSOs) is encouraging more disabled people to find out and play out over summer. Active Summer Fun -#ActiveSummerFun on social media - is an exciting new campaign that aims to support more disabled people to find ways to be active during the warmer months.
This summer we will be hearing from various disabled people, who lead active lifestyles in all sorts of ways. We hear how they are expecting the next few months to be very busy!
Today, water sports and skiing enthusiast Jemma Brown talks to us. She discusses making the transition from playing cricket to wheelchair basketball, and what she loves about playing sport.
Jemma’s Active Summer Fun:
I can often be found taking my guide dog out for her walks in local fields. I actually can’t walk that far because of my disability, so there are lots of sitting down spells during those walks.
The main thing I do is playing wheelchair basketball. (Up until this year I would often play blind cricket for Hampshire, but because my physical impairment deteriorated in December, I have had to give up cricket for the present time.)
I am 26 now and had been playing cricket for almost 10 years, whereas I have only been playing basketball since February. It’s quite interesting, playing wheelchair basketball while also being registered blind. It’s always going to be a challenge to make those two work together, but I’m up for it as I’m sport mad!
My eye condition and physical impairment are not linked. I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome which affects my connecting tissues – my joints are very weak and I have twists in some of my bones and in my lower body.
But my unrelated eye conditions, of which I have about 13, mean I have a visual field of 5-10% in my left eye and cannot see out of the other. That means I can’t judge distances easily, but the people at basketball are giving me lots of support. Communication is key, and as play will shift from just one end of the court as you’re defending to the other end as an attacker, my lack of depth of vision has not proved to be as big an issue as I had feared.
Up until December I was also playing in the partially sighted football league, one of very few women playing in that nationally. Unfortunately, I then got an injury - not a minor one either… my kneecap is sitting two centimetres out of joint and it will never significantly improve!
By February I was so fed up at not playing any sport or doing any exercise with the injury, I took to the internet to see if there was anything I could participate in locally. Amazingly, there was a wheelchair basketball club just 10 minutes down the road from where I live near Southampton beach.
I contacted Hampshire Harriers and it was very straightforward with them in terms of disclosing the extent of my visual impairment. I hadn’t played basketball since I was at school and I had never played wheelchair sport, but it didn’t matter at all. I didn’t even know the rules or any of the techniques!
They suggested I come and have a go and see how it went. Since then, I’ve been playing and training most weeks. I am even looking at playing in a team in Division 4 when the season starts, which is quite daunting considering I only started playing in February and still have quite a loose understanding of the laws of the game!
Hampshire Harriers have three teams, so if we are all there for training then quite often we’ll play matches. I have had a little go at playing in a game situation, which was really good. I train every week on a Sunday for three hours, when I’m fit and able to.
I enjoy wheelchair basketball because it’s accessible. In my first week I had an enormous revelation that I could move faster and further in a wheelchair than I could run. I also trained in week one and completed the session. That was the first time since I was a teenager that I had enjoyed playing sport and had not been in pain afterwards. It was a really revolutionary thing for me.
I need to play with a certain size of ball, and also don’t yet have my own sports wheelchair. They cost around £3,000! At the moment I am loaning a chair from the Harriers when I play basketball.
This summer is one of rehabilitation, but I am aiming to get back to the gym. It’s a constant battle to recover from the injuries that I am so prone to getting.
My advice to others would be to make contact with a local sports club and have a go. If you turn up for your first week and you’re totally rubbish, do not be disheartened. A lot of people will see disabled people in sport and feel they will never reach that same high standard, and then give up. I have tried pilates and exercise classes and so on. I don’t enjoy them as much as I enjoy playing a sport as part of a team.
In some of the sports I’ve played, I have often not been the only visually impaired player. So, we’re equal - none of us can understand what the other players can and cannot see. That means the communication and the camaraderie, the laughing when you fall over and miss the ball, can be great fun!
You can find out more about Active Summer Fun. Find out and play out this summer. WheelPower provides opportunities, facilities and equipment to enable wheelchair users to participate in sport and lead healthy active lives. British Blind Sport provides visually impaired people with opportunities to participate in sport and physical activity.
