Friday, February 23, 2007
It’s early 1995 in Tescott, Kan. Jarvis Stirn takes a late-night nap in the passenger seat of his buddy’s car. The driver, drunk, dozes off and crashes into a culvert. Stirn is thrown into the road. His back snaps.
Now Stirn, a Lawrence resident, is jovial. His one-year-old daughter, sitting on mother Sarah’s lap, munches crackers. Stirn doesn’t have feeling below his waist and uses a wheelchair, but is uninhibited by it. This weekend, he’ll be playing basketball with friends.
“I had a few hard times. Eventually, I said I’m going to take it as it comes at me and do the best with it,” he said.
Clean-shaven, 32 years old with the neck and arms of a linebacker, Stirn plays point guard and is team representative for the Kansas Wheelhawks, a wheelchair basketball team that attracts players ages 14 to 56, from Manhattan to Spring Hill.
“It builds a bond with other people with similar injuries to yourself,” Stirn said. This is his ninth season on the team.
Ablehawks, a campus advocacy group that helps fellow students with disabilities, will sponsor Saturday’s wheelchair basketball game. The game will take place at 7:30 p.m. in the Student Recreation and Fitness Center.
Stirn played basketball recreationally in his hometown of Tescott, which has a population less than 400 people. After the car accident, Stirn had scant interest in playing the game in a wheelchair.
However, after his first night back on the court, he fell in love with it again.
He began attending practice, eventually buying a custom basketball wheelchair, which cost $2,000 to $3,000, he said.
Push, push, dribble, repeat. The coordination took some time to master.
Katey Birge, Denver, Colo., senior and president of AbleHawks, said the game would help raise awareness of students with disabilities.
More than 3,000 students at the University have disabilities ranging from dyslexia to mobility impairments, she said, but the Lawrence campus’ hilly terrain was discouraging for disabled prospective students.
“Many students who use a wheelchair don’t come to KU,” Birge said.
Melissa Manning, associate director of Disability Resources, said a long-standing stigma worked against those with physical disabilities.
“There is a well-meant but mistaken tendency to pity these folks and do things for them that they can do themselves,” she said.
Stirn said some people in wheelchairs felt like they needed to do things by themselves to have a sense of control, but courtesy from others never bothered him. If somebody offers to open a door for Stirn, he doesn’t mind.
“It’s one less time you have to open a door,” he said.
Kansan staff writer Brian Lewis-Jones can be contacted at bljones@kansan.com.
— Edited by Trevan Mcgee
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