ORANGE TOWNSHIP — There’s one important rule to remember when playing basketball in a wheelchair.
You have to keep your bottoms in the seat.
“No standing or pushing your bottoms up,” said Kaley Underwood.
The Adaptive Sports Ohio representative gave the instruction to a group of 65 first grade students at Mapleton Elementary School on Wednesday.
The Wooster-based organization serves hundreds of physically impaired youth and adults across the state through competitive and recreational sports.
It partnered with Mapleton to organize a “PE Takeover” day. It meant the students — most of them able bodied — got to learn how to play games and other activities while bound to a wheelchair.
The idea came when in the fall Adaptive Sports Ohio visited the district’s high school for an assembly. It featured high school students getting a chance to play basketball while in a wheelchair.
“We wanted to expose our students to this to teach empathy and to get away from just sympathy,” said Nancy Welch, the elementary physical education teacher.
Welch, who also teaches health classes to middle schoolers, said she graduated from Wright State University — a campus known nationally for its wheelchair-friendly features and accessibility.
Educating kids about how physically disabled people get around and recreate is an important part of Adaptive Sports Ohio’s mission, Underwood said.
She visits 30 districts and 49 schools around Ohio, whether that’s to bring an assembly or having gym class takeovers like at Mapleton Elementary.
Each class had a chance to play games from 12 wheelchairs that Adaptive Sports Ohio brought for the afternoon. The first graders — the largest of the grades — took turns having “free play,” as Underwood called it.
Here’s how it worked: students paired up. One of them sat in the wheelchair, the other fetched basketballs and dodgeballs for them. But one of them couldn’t help herself.
She bounced the basketball and practiced shooting hoops. Her partner didn’t seem to mind. He just wheeled around the gym, grinning as he gained speed.
Older grades had a chance to play organized basketball games against their peers and to perform mobility drills around cones.
Welch loved it. She hopes to bring the organization back in the fall to allow students to form a basketball team to play against one of the group’s teams.
“If we can pull it off, it would be a fundraiser for them,” she said, adding the cost of each wheelchair reaches into the thousands of dollars.