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UNITED STATES QUAD RUGBY ASSOCIATION Related Pages |
April 4, 1998
CRASH COURSE BY KURT KRAGTHORPE The action was fast and aggressive and the hitting was furious during Friday's rugby event at Salt Lake Community College. First-time spectators are usually surprised about the degree of contact in this sport. "People think that anybody who has a broken neck is fragile," observed wheelchair athletics expert Mike Schlappi. Houston's Brad Updegrove and other contestants in the Quad Rugby Association National Championships hardly left any such impression. "The contact," Updegrove said, when asked about the sport's appeal. Wheelchair rugby is known in America as "Quad Rugby," the only sport played exclusively by quadriplegics, persons with some dysfunction in all of their extremities. In Canada where the game originated in the late 1970's it was called "Murderball." "Had a hard time getting sponsors," said Art Berg, the director of this weekend's tournament. The 12-team event continues all day today at the Taylorsville High School gym, with the championship game Sunday at 1:30 p.m. at SLCC's Redwood Road campus. Quad rugby is a 4-on-4 game, using a volleyball and incorporating rules from football, hockey, soccer and basketball. The player with the ball must dribble or pass within 10 seconds. Crashing one wheelchair into another is not only allowed but encouraged- as long as players do not hit one another squarely in the back or behind the axle, causing a spin. Those hits send the offender to the penalty box. One of the players' sayings is, "The hit isn't real unless it bends steel." "It's a very aggressive game," Berg says. "That's why people love it. That's what makes it rugby." The basic strategy is to carry the ball across the goal line, resulting in one point. Offensive players try to set screens for ballhandlers, just as in basketball. Reggie Richner, a rehabilitation specialist and coach of the San Diego-based Sharp Shadow, the two-time defending champion. cites "fundamentals" and "smart play" as his team's secrets. Defenses include zone, man-to-man, fullcourt traps and other schemes- such as having two or three players guarding Updegrove, a member of the U.S. team that won the gold medal in the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta where rugby was a demonstration sport. It will have medal status in Sydney in 2000. Known as one of the rugby world's fastest athletes, Updegrove sometimes longs for the old days when he was not "a dominant player" and was guarded one-on-one. Yet he's happy with the sport's growth and his own development in the game. A former football player and wrestler, Updegrove discovered after his accident that "I was missing something in my life. I never knew what it was" until he found quad rugby, after dabbling in other wheelchair sports. The same is true of many Utahans, although the Utah Extreme-whose players live from Ogden to Provo- failed to qualify for the national tournament. Berg, the team's founder and captain, is an author and motivational speaker who lives in Highland and made 209 speeches in a year, traveling 200,000 miles. Watching a game Friday in SLCC's Lifetime Activities Center, he told stories of a teammate who was recruited to play rugby even as he was recovering in a hospital and of another who tried to commit suicide but now attends college after rugby turned his life around. "There's no better way to get stronger, to see what the possibilities are to network.... It's just unbelievable," Berg said.
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