Help Teach

Help Teach - Episode 13: Para Parenting Pt. 2
Mihai Covaser: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Help Teach, and to part two of my thirteenth episode, opening off season two.

Mihai Covaser: Welcome back. The guest that I have with me today, continuing our conversation from last time, is Dr. Jaimie Borisoff. Jaimie, thank you very much again for your time.

Jaimie Borisoff: You’re welcome. It’s great to be here. I really enjoyed chatting with you in part one.

Mihai Covaser: So part two today, I want to dedicate to a question that we got from Gracie. One of my audience members reached out and mentioned that they wanted to know more about para sport and the Paralympics. It’s something that’s always interested them, they have some family that have done it, but don’t really know much about it themselves. So that’s exactly where I want to kick it off today. Can you just tell us a little bit about your experience, first of all, with para sport and the Paralympics?

Jaimie Borisoff: Sure, I’d love to. After my car accident that we talked about previously, when I was nineteen, [00:01:00] I was very quickly introduced to wheelchair basketball. I was a hockey player and a baseball player growing up. In fact, when I was nineteen, when I had my car accident, I was actually playing baseball that summer still, still playing amateur baseball. So I was an athlete all my life and played team sports in rehab, at GF Strong, as many of us know very well in this here part of the world, our local rehab center. They do a great job introducing people to different activities at GF Strong; there was someone who was back for some out-patient rehab, in a wheelchair for several years, was a local wheelchair basketball player, and he had his own car. Dave Schneider was his name, and he actually took me to a wheelchair basketball practice.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: When I was still in rehab. That was really cool. I got introduced to that sport very early on, [00:02:00] just really a few months into being a wheelchair user.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: I was, as I mentioned, someone that was really interested in team sports growing up. At the time–this was back in 1989, 1990–there was really two main sports that kind of dominated our area. One is wheelchair basketball, and the other one was track and field.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: And I gravitated immediately to the team sport. I was never interested in the individual sports as much, maybe because I was lazy, I didn’t want to go wheel around the block or wheel around the track. But I really loved the social aspect of being part of a team and–

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, for sure.

Jaimie Borisoff: And experiencing competition that way. Never played basketball before. And we also didn’t have what was called sledge hockey or para ice hockey in our area, was not well-established either back then, so I didn’t have an opportunity to try that. So the short story: I started playing wheelchair basketball, really liked it. We had [00:03:00] a really strong organization locally in Vancouver. BC Wheelchair Basketball is headquartered here, it still is. We had a lot of good trailblazers in the sport, Rick Hansen being one of them; Terry Fox as well, before that, played wheelchair basketball, and many other great players. Again, being in a city like Vancouver with a lot of people, a good density of people; there was enough people around to have, you know, practices and teams in a league.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: There was one good message right off the bat about para sport and being involved with wheelchair sports. It sure helps when you’re in a place that has a lot of athletes that want to take part.

Mihai Covaser: For sure. And that’s because–Something that people may not know is that a lot of para sports invite people who are not themselves disabled to also come in and participate, right, and I think wheelchair basketball is a prime example of that, where you have a lot of people that are able-bodied, but also participate in those sport, right.

Jaimie Borisoff: [00:04:00] Absolutely. So we call it an integrated sport in that regard. We’ll talk a little bit about Paralympics in a minute, but at the Paralympics, it’s not integrated. But in Canada, everywhere up to the Paralympic level, so local club teams, the provincial teams even are integrated, so able-bodied players can play right alongside someone with a disability, and to us, as wheelchair basketball players, the wheelchair is just a piece of sporting equipment.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: As soon as you sit down in it, you’re now taking part in the sport.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm, mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: And that is beneficial in so many ways, primarily in the way that I was describing earlier, that you need athletes, you need players, you need participants to have a sport.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: You can’t play a team sport if you only have two or three people. Not one that requires five a side.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: And so particularly for women’s sports, too–Women wheelchair athletes, para sport athletes are fewer and far-between, compared to men, just based on demographics.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: There’s not as many [00:05:00] girls and women injured in the way that men are, for whatever reason, and so there’s not as many athletes.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: In particular for women, it is very important to be integrated and have a wide participation.

Mihai Covaser: Talking about that; so you started at the local level, you started to train and play basketball, climbing the ranks, then, as you do in many other sports: local to provincial to national level. I should also mention for our audience, if you’re interested in looking up more information, Jaimie was also recently inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame for wheelchair basketball, so congratulations on that. What I did want to get into, though, is how exactly do you determine how to group people up for para sports? This is something that people may not know and I think it’s quite interesting, so the classification system, as you call it, that tells you who can compete against who, because people have a variety of disabilities, different function… So why don’t you get into the classification system for para sport and tell us a little bit about what that means?

Jaimie Borisoff: Sure. And that’s a good segue from [00:06:00] the integrated aspect of wheelchair basketball and having able-bodied participants, as well. The classification system is paramount to that working. Comparing myself, for instance, as I described in the last episode, as someone who has very poor trunk function, being paralyzed from the chest down, having a great deal of impairment physically–Comparing that to an able-bodied man, who can pick up his wheelchair and hold it over his head and climb stairs and put it down again and sit down; that’s a marked difference in physical ability. So what wheelchair basketball has done–and this is just a brilliant thing that happened very early on in the sport, as far as I understand–is they came up with a classification system to give each player a point ranking, based on their level of impairment.

Mihai Covaser: Okay.

Jaimie Borisoff: And so, using myself as an example–I describe myself as a T-4 paraplegic, paralyzed from the chest down–[00:07:00] I am given the lowest point ranking in wheelchair basketball: one point.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: The able-bodied people that we’ve been talking about, they’re given a ranking of four-point-five points, and that’s the same as a single-leg amputee, for instance. A single-leg amputee would be given a rank of four-point-five, as well, because they are no different from an able-bodied person, once they sit down in that wheelchair.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: You’re not using your legs in the same way, obviously; often, you strap yourself into the chair. They are gonna use their legs and hips, and certainly their trunk, to balance, to stabilize, to propel their wheelchair, but they’re gonna be no different from the able-bodied person.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: So they’re given a four-point-five class. Many people who are listening to this show know a little bit about Rick Hansen or have seen him before; he’s a two, a two-point-zero. And the point system goes in point-five increments, so one, one-point-five, all the way up to four-point-five. So that’s just a couple examples; an able-bodied person or a single leg amputee would be four-point-five, Rick Hansen would be a two, [00:08:00] I’m a one. And then what wheelchair basketball does is it gives a total maximum amount of points that any team can have on the floor at one time.

Mihai Covaser: Ah, I see.

Jaimie Borisoff: Yeah. It depends a little bit on what league you’re playing and what level you’re playing at, but in the Paralympics, it’s fourteen points. So, for instance, when I was on the national team, we had a lineup that had two four-point-five players, a two-point-five player, and two one-point players. That is thirteen and a half points, so we actually played under points quite often, what’s called “playing under points”.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: And it really makes it an interesting, strategic issue for the coaches, for instance.

Mihai Covaser: Yes.

Jaimie Borisoff: Maybe one person gets into foul trouble or you want to switch out someone for a different player. Sometimes you’d have to make a double switch, or even three players at once, because maybe you don’t have a one to swap out for the one-point player that’s coming out; maybe there’s a one-point-five player or a two. And maybe you have to swap two players at once; maybe we take a one [00:09:00] and a four-point-five for a two and a three-and-a-half.

Mihai Covaser: Interesting, okay.

Jaimie Borisoff: And that is how, again, all these people can compete on the floor at the same time, because quite frankly, if I look at my teammates who are four-point-fives, including the legendary Patrick Anderson, who’s this Canadian man from Ontario. He’s arguably, I think, you know, arguably the greatest wheelchair basketball player ever, and leading our team to be a bit of a dynasty in wheelchair basketball. I was fortunate enough to be on teams that won two gold medals and a silver medal at the Paralympics, and then Pat went on after me to win another gold medal in London. My last Paralympics was in Beijing, in 2008. So–But if you look at what Pat can do on the floor and what I can do on the floor, they’re vastly different. He’s a four-point-five, I’m a one. He sits higher because he has better stability.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: He moves faster because he can push his chair with his trunk muscles, as well as his arms, in ways that I can’t. [00:10:00] And it’s just, again, all around more function.

Mihai Covaser: Interesting. Interesting. That’s super cool; I never realized that that’s how it worked and–I mean, as you say, that seems really functional and really a good way of putting a lot of various people on the floor together. But yeah, not something people think about, I guess.

Jaimie Borisoff: We can also integrate the sport in another way and that’s through gender, as well.

Mihai Covaser: Ah.

Jaimie Borisoff: And so, again, below the Paralympic level, at the club team level, often women will play with men on the same teams. And as is, I think, experienced in many sports, there’s also women’s classes or women’s events and men’s events, because women may not be as strong or as fast at the highest levels. So what we do with wheelchair basketball is you’re given an extra point on the floor, for instance. So let’s say you have one woman on the floor in an integrated basketball team, you’d get to play fifteen points, instead of fourteen points. And we’re not talking about skill, and that’s very important; we’re not talking about [00:11:00] one’s inherent skill or how well do they shoot a basketball, for instance, or what is their skill level. We’re talking about their kind of ceiling for function.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: Can they reach down to the floor and pick up a basketball with two hands and sit back up again? Well, yes or no. Pat can, I cannot.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm, mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: So that’s not a skill issue, that’s a function issue.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: And I don’t think this is controversial to say, but can a woman bench press as much as a man in any given two people, right? In general, the answer’s no.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: And so that’s just an acknowledgement that there are differences, and there’s differences in people’s classes, and there’s differences in people’s impairments in para sport.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: And I think in the National Paralympic Association, they do kind of almost make an analogy between the classification system and, say, boxing, for instance, which has weight classes.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: And gender classes.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: Women fight women, men fight men who weigh two hundred pounds, box men who weigh two hundred pounds, and men who weigh a hundred and thirty pounds box [00:12:00] men who weigh a hundred and thirty pounds, because…yeah.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Cool, very interesting. And do all adaptive sports do something like that, or is that something unique to wheelchair basketball?

Jaimie Borisoff: So classification is very sport-specific. So my understanding is all para sport has a classification system, but sometimes, actually, there’s only a single class. So para hockey would be an example of that–formerly called sledge hockey, now called para hockey, which is obviously a great sport in Canada, being a hockey nation.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: The class in para hockey is that you have to have an impairment in the lower part of your body.

Mihai Covaser: Ah, I see.

Jaimie Borisoff: But it doesn’t distinguish between, say, myself in basketball as a one and a class two or four-point-five.

Mihai Covaser: Okay.

Jaimie Borisoff: What you’ll find is that most of the, you know, Team Canada members on the national team are lower-limb amputees. They all have full trunk function, many of them can walk, and so it’s a different level of sport in that regard, [00:13:00] in the sense of the function and the fact that it’s a single class.

Mihai Covaser: So that can, as you say, maybe present a barrier to some people moving on to the highest levels of that particular sport, right.

Jaimie Borisoff: Yeah. I think it’d be very rare, and I’m not sure if there’s anybody with my level of disability on the national sledge hockey–para ice hockey–team. We’re talking–I know, when I played–and I have played a little bit of para ice hockey now, over the years; it’s a bigger sport now in Vancouver than it was when I was first injured. I know the high-level players that can compete at the national level, they take it easy on someone like me, if they’re gonna have me under the boards. I can’t stabilize my trunk and protect myself in the same way that they can, and so they’re generally pretty good about, you know, not ramming you into the boards in the same way that they might their own teammates or competitors at the national team level.

Mihai Covaser: Interesting. I actually haven’t watched a lot of para ice hockey myself; [00:14:00] I was actually–now, I had spoken to Maggie recently, who was also on the show as a previous guest, and we had a conversation off-camera, so to speak, about para ice hockey, and so something I was looking into, but they get as physical as real hockey, hey?

Jaimie Borisoff: It’s full contact. Yeah, you don’t want to get hit.

Mihai Covaser: Wow. That sounds interesting; I’m definitely–I’ll be looking into that.

Jaimie Borisoff: It’s fast and physical.

Mihai Covaser: So for someone who might be looking at the Paralympics, who might be either an aspiring Paralympian or just interested in entering the world of adaptive sports, what might that trajectory look like for someone? Is it pretty similar to how you would do it in any other sport? What does that kind of look like?

Jaimie Borisoff: I suspect it’s pretty similar with the caveats we all face in all various aspects of society that we talked about in part one of this conversation, that sometimes it’s a bit more difficult.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: [00:15:00] If you live in a city like Vancouver in the lower mainland, or British Columbia, it’s relatively straightforward; there are great organizations that are easy to find and they run programs, and it’s really a matter of just showing up to the program. And usually they even have the equipment for you, the wheelchairs that you might first use to start out in. When you start playing a little bit more and you want to become an avid, regular participant, you’re gonna want to get your own wheelchair that’s dialed in and optimized just for you.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: But at the beginning, organizations with the right amount of people will have the equipment, as well, so you can try it out. And then, if you join a club, you know, a local area and go to practices and show up and get put on teams and start competing. And, again, the bigger sports and the bigger population centers have leagues, and several times a week that you can get together and do this, and so you start progressing through the clubs and often there’s provincial teams in whatever sport you might want to participate in, and hopefully you make the provincial team, [00:16:00] and you can kind of keep on building that way.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah. I’ll add some information to the show notes, links to some of these clubs that might exist in different areas, especially–I’ll post them for B.C., because we live here, but yeah. I’ll add some information about that, so people can see what programs do exist and, you know, what those sports might look like at those levels. You were mentioning earlier the equipment that you have designed for your own chair, stuff like the Elevation seat. Are those kinds of things banned on the rink or on the floor? You can’t boost up in your seat and take a half-court shot?

Jaimie Borisoff: No. I have thought about it, but it would not be an allowed thing. There are pretty strict rules about how high your chair can be and a lot to do with safety, for instance, so that you’re not using unsafe equipment, and a lot to do with, again, keeping a level playing field for everybody.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: And the seat height in wheelchair basketball is probably [00:17:00] the best example, where there’s a maximum seat height you can have and a maximum size of wheel you can have, for instance; so you can’t have, you know, someone making these huge wheels, for instance, that would make you higher.

Mihai Covaser: Monster truck tires.

Jaimie Borisoff: Yeah, monster truck tires. It’s really interesting, actually; as I progressed through my career and my experience of wheelchair basketball–When I first started playing, we just used our everyday chairs.

Mihai Covaser: Wow, okay.

Jaimie Borisoff: There was no such thing, at the time, as a wheelchair basketball chair. There was a racing chair, if you wanted to do track or road racing.

Mihai Covaser: Uh-huh.

Jaimie Borisoff: But there was no wheelchair basketball chair. That changed really quickly, actually; it just took a few years until they started to become specialized chairs for basketball, tennis, wheelchair rugby, and all these other sports now have their own chairs.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm. Interesting. There’s just one other question here that I thought would be interesting to dive into, just to clarify those distinctions for people, because a term that’s thrown out often, you know, in media, especially [00:18:00] older media; it’s kinda thrown around in a pejorative fashion–but the difference between the Special Olympics and the Paralympics, because I think people maybe conflate the two sometimes. So what is the difference there?

Jaimie Borisoff: Yeah! No, it’s a great question and, as you said, people often do confuse the two things. So interesting enough, the Special Olympics, as far as I know, is actually the biggest sport organization in the world; it’s really big, and one of the reasons it is so big is that its mandate is all about participation, and it’s a sporting event and a sporting ecosystem that anybody can participate in, if they fit, obviously, the criteria of the Special Olympics, and that’s–they can be physical disability, but primarily intellectual disabilities. And so it’s an organization that’s all about participation, whereas the Paralympics is about competition and elite sport, so it’s very much analogous to the Olympics.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: And interesting enough–and I didn’t know this for [00:19:00] the longest time; I think I was a Paralympian before I ever knew this–is that “para” in “Paralympics”; many people think it stands for “paraplegic”, like some sort of disability. But it actually stands for “parallel”. So it’s a sporting event that’s parallel to the Olympics.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: For people with physical disabilities. And it’s geared more towards, again, competition and elite sport. And so one thing you’ll find in the Paralympics is that doping happens, cheating happens in the Paralympics, just as it does in the Olympics.

Mihai Covaser: Really?

Jaimie Borisoff: Which–It’s kind of a funny example that I’m using to maybe distinguish it between that and the Special Olympics, but it does, you know–The winning is very important in the Paralympics, and it’s a different mindset. As I mentioned, it is parallel to the Olympics; it happens in the same venues, in the same cities as the Olympics, and again, it is a different reason that it exists.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah. And so the Special Olympics, are they also integrated, then? They encourage participation from able-bodied players alongside other [00:20:00] players, or as far as you know? Maybe you’re not super familiar, but…

Jaimie Borisoff: I’m not super familiar with it, but I do know that one thing they do do, because it is intentionally designed so that everybody can participate, is that they do distinguish between skill levels, so that people of a certain–of the same skill level will play against each other.

Mihai Covaser: Okay.

Jaimie Borisoff: And so, much like we do classification for function, they do it for skill.

Mihai Covaser: Okay, okay.

Jaimie Borisoff: That would be another, I think, way that things are different, I think.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah. At the Paralympics, you’re just expected to be at elite of skill for your function, but that function is more important to differentiate, whereas at the Special Olympics, it’s about grouping people who can reasonably play together, right?

Jaimie Borisoff: Yeah, and can have a nice, equitable game together.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah. Perfect. Awesome. Well, I really appreciate that clarification; I think that’ll give some good information for our audience here to understand what that means, what it involves, getting into it. Actually, just in this past episode, in episode twelve, I had on [00:21:00] a friend of mine, James Kwinecki, who is a blind para athlete. He’s vision-impaired and he is playing now for UVic; he’s a rower, and he’s done a variety of sports, as well, in the past. Baseball, as well. You know, maybe I’ll definitely have him back on the show at some point, and so now I think this’ll give our audience a great opportunity to understand a bit more what it means to get into para sport and how that might look for people. With that, I think that pretty much is taking us to the end of our time together, so I wanted to thank you again for coming on for this special episode, taking a bit of time to speak to me. In terms of a key takeaway for this part two of the episode, I would like to refer the audience back to what I said in part one about sharing accessible information, in terms of beginning the school year, and I will also be adding, as I mentioned, plenty of information into this episode description, regarding para sports, how you can get involved, links to organizations, and all that kind of thing, in hopes of encouraging students or educators to share that with each other and [00:22:00] to be able to get out and participate in sport, because it really is a great opportunity for people. So once again, thank you very much, Dr. Borisoff, for coming on the show and speaking to me, and I look forward to keeping in touch.

Jaimie Borisoff: Thanks for having me on. It was a pleasure to be here.