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COVER STORY
Dunn joined Steelwheelers while
finishing grad school at Pitt
Then in 2013, a friend took her to watch a
wheelchair rugby practice.
Stahlstown’s Katie Smith, who was paralyzed
from the chest down following a car
accident in 2007, was already a passionate
wheelchair rugby player at that point. She
played with the Pittsburgh Steelwheelers,
a nonprofit that provides opportunities for
athletes with disabilities to participate in
rugby, basketball, hand cycling and other
adaptive sports, and knew all the benefits
sports had to offer people with spinal cord
injuries.
Having a mentor is an important part of
learning how to navigate the world post-spinal
cord injury, Smith said, and having a
team full of peers is even better. She first
learned of the sport at a doctor’s appointment
when a man in a wheelchair introduced
himself, said he played wheelchair rugby and
invited her to a practice.
“I played rugby in college, and when he
said wheelchair rugby I was like, ‘That’s a
thing?” Smith said. “They put me in a chair
and crashed into me a few times and I was
sold. Then that same guy said, ‘Come to a
tournament,’ so I hopped in his van and went
to a tournament and that was the first time I
left home without a caregiver (since the accident).
One of the guys had a girlfriend who
helped him, and she helped me a little with
getting into bed and personal care things.
But I stayed overnight, traveled without a
caregiver and played wheelchair rugby. It
was so empowering to know that I could do
that. I learned how to function in rehab, but
I learned how to live my life as a person with
a spinal cord injury and a disability from
my teammates and the people I met through
wheelchair rugby.”
‘Murderball’
According to USA Wheelchair Rugby, the
sport was invented in 1977 in Canada by
quadriplegic athletes looking for a sport in
which players with reduced arm and hand
function could participate equally. Players
are classified on a point system depending
on function, ranging from 0.5 to 3.5, and the
sum of the five players on the court at any
given time cannot exceed eight.
The very first international competition
was played in 1990 at the World Stoke Mandeville
Games, with the U.S. beating Canada
for the gold medal. It became a Paralympic
sport beginning in 1996 in Atlanta, where the
U.S. went undefeated at 7-0 and beat Canada
(Wheelchair tugby) gained some
notoriety after the release of the
2005 Oscar-nominated documentary
feature, “Murderball,” which followed
the intense and highly physical
rivalry between the U.S. and Canada
leading up to the 2004 Paralympics.
for the gold medal. The U.S. has medaled in
every Paralympics since, winning gold in
2000 and 2008, bronze in 2004 and 2012 and
silver at the most recent Games in Rio in
2016. The team is currently ranked No. 2 in
the world behind Australia.
The sport gained some notoriety after
the release of the 2005 Oscar-nominated
documentary feature, “Murderball,” which
followed the intense and highly physical
rivalry between the U.S. and Canada leading
up to the 2004 Paralympics.
Dunn saw that first practice with the
Steelwheelers and knew she wanted to play.
She joined the team in 2014 and started
playing in a half dozen tournaments a year
once she finished graduate school at Pitt, but
was completely surprised when Chuck Aoki
and Joe Delagrave, two longtime Paralympic
and national team members, reached out to
her on Facebook in 2017.
They wanted to know about her classification,
how long she’d been playing and
whether or not she had any interest in trying
out for the national team.
“Which, of course, I did,” she said.
Dunn tried out for the first time in 2018.
She didn’t make the team, but the coaches
were intrigued both by her classification —
because women have a half-point deducted
from their classification Dunn actually plays
at a 0 — and her desire to learn and progress
in the sport, and told her what she needed to
do to compete with the national team.
“What we saw was someone very raw; she
hadn’t had a whole lot of elite rugby experience,”
said longtime USA Wheelchair Rugby
coach James Gumbert. “And she wasn’t as
strong as she’d like, but she was enticing
enough that we said well, let’s take a look
at her. She went through the weekend and,
to her credit, she just never quit. She has
big heart and passion. That’s a big thing I’d
really say about her is she had a desire to be
something better than what she was. She was
there to make an impression. We brought her
back the year after and she’d gotten better so