Becoming a Regina Regal
This time of year always causes me to think about the time I remember truly belonging to a group. While it certainly happened to varying degrees before, February 2000 was the first time I really remember feeling like I mattered and belonged. I was a freshman wheelchair racer, the only one, on the Regina High School track team. I joined a group of teammates and coaches who had no idea what it meant to have a teammate or an athlete who competed on wheels, and guess what, none of that mattered.
What mattered was that I was there, I was motivated, and I wanted to give nothing but my best every day. I was proud to represent something bigger than myself. I wanted the chance to be part of the tradition of what it meant to be a Regina Regal. When Mom, Dad, and I met with Coach Brown about a month earlier in preparation for the season, he was candid. Coach said, “I’ve never coached a wheelchair athlete before, but we’ll figure it out.”
When my parents volunteered to transport me and my racing chair to meets, Coach’s response was brief and direct, “No. Tim’s on our team, we’ll figure it out.” Even with so many lingering questions, Coach’s matter-of-fact statement of “Tim’s on our team, we’ll figure it out,” set the tone. To Coach, my limitations never mattered. I was one of his athletes on his team and we’d figure the rest out, together.
There were lots of hurdles that year. From figuring out how I got in my chair without Mom or Dad’s help to how to get down and back up the hill leading to Regina’s track, from how I got on a school bus to how did I train, it all centered around the question: what did success even look like for me as a wheelchair athlete?
However, 99% of my worries never came to fruition. Lead by a remarkable group of senior class teammates, I never felt out of place. There were all sorts of teammates: teammates who helped me get in and out of my chair, teammates who held my chair so I didn’t careen out of control on my way downhill to practice, and teammates who helped push my chair back up the hill when practice was done for the day.
There were fist bumps for a job well done and shouts of encouragement when they knew I could be better. There was instinctively slowing of our post meet victory laps so I could keep up. And don’t worry, there were also plenty of hijinks like when teammates tried to hurdle my chair… Let’s just say it went better for our high jumpers than it did our shot putters. There was even a time when I got clotheslined by a resistance parachute when I got too close to a teammate during a workout.
The crazy part was that even though high school students are notoriously self conscious, no one blinked an eye. How I competed didn’t matter. What it looked like didn’t matter. I wore the navy and gold of the Regina Regals and that is all that mattered. I belonged. Twenty three years later, it’s the powerful sense of belonging I felt as a Regina Track athlete that drives the work I do with Open Doors Consulting.