Who are the Kingdom Wheelblasters?

Dan Keanrney spoke with some of the Kingdom Wheelblasters National League players who have some very interesting life stories to tell

Paul Murphy

PAUL Murphy grew up in a sports mad house in Scartaglin where he passionately followed the fortunes of the Kerry football team, as well as his own local club side. Born with cerebral palsy, he never thought that he would see the day that he would be able to play sport himself, but the Kingdom Wheelblazers have afforded him the opportunity to do so.

“I first got involved with the team in 2017, I think. I went along one night, and we had a few training sessions and we thought that we had enough for a team. We trained over the summer and we then entered the league for the 2018/2019 season.

“I was born with cerebral palsy. I’m 35 years of age but there’s a guy that plays with Killester who’s 60, so I don’t feel too bad! I would never have played sport until I started playing this, so from that point of view I find it amazing. Even being at the St Mary’s Christmas Blitz I find it easier to identify with what we do in a match. They are doing the exact same thing as us, except that we are in a chair. When you see them blocking or rebounding or trying to score you can say, “that’s what we do”, except we are in a chair and not running about like them”.

The first season was tough for the team and they shipped a few hidings from more experienced opponents. Paul likes to refer to this as a “learning experience”, but he can see vast improvement as time has gone on.

“The first season was a learning experience. A lot of the teams had been at it a long time and had come up through their junior set ups, so it wasn’t really about results for us, it was more about keeping things going. We got a few hidings, but that was to be expected.

“There’s a lot of travelling, the first year we travelled to Derry, Galway, Laois, Kilkenny, as well as our home games and It was all about learning your position. We played teams that had athletes who played in the Olympics, muscular, strong players, so it was like men against boys a lot of times. The main thing was that we stuck at it though.

“I play at guard so it’s my job to try and get the shooter in, or if we are on defence it’s about getting back to our zone as quickly as possible and following the faster players. It’s all about opening up space for your teammate and putting them in a good shooting position. It’s about giving them that vital second or two that they can take off the shot. On defence, it’s all about slowing down their quicker players momentum. It kills the chair, and they have to start again to get going again”.

Wheelchair basketball carries most of the same rules as regular basketball. The games are played on a full sized court with the rings set at ten feet, they are timed at forty minutes, there are four quarters, timeouts, substitutions, two referees, fouls are called, and the shot clock is enforced. There is one very obvious difference when it comes to dribbling the ball though, as Paul explained.

“You can push twice, but then you have to bounce the ball. If you push more than two times and don’t bounce the ball, it’s considered a travel. Some players are so quick at pushing that it gives them a fierce advantage. They can twist with their trunk and they can get around you easily without putting their hands on the wheels. Amputees trunks in general are very strong, and they turn and twist their bodies in a chair much easier, which gives them a fierce advantage at times.

“If you have a made to measure chair it’s a big help also. Some of us are using older chairs that aren’t made to measure but hopefully by the time the season resumes we will all have new ones”.

Paul is a busy man, and as well as the wheelchair basketball he is also the PRO of the Kerry LGFA. With the ladies football season also at a standstill, he is looking forward to when the basketball restarts. The social aspect of the game, and meeting new people, is what he misses the most at the moment

“I’d always go and watch sport, and to be in the thick of the action is something else altogether. It’s great to meet others from around the country that you’d have something in common with and they are great for giving encouragement. You’d miss all that when you can’t do it. Hopefully we will be back playing again in the near future”.

Paul O’Flaherty

IT would have been very easy to understand if Moyvane man Paul O’Flaherty had given up on sport altogether when his Paralympic dreams were shattered back in 2015. As one of Ireland’s elite hand cyclists, the Moyvane man was tipped for a place on the plane for Rio in 2016, but for the second time in his young life, the hand of fate took a wrong turn.

“I used to hand cycle and I wasn’t too bad at it. I won the nationals here at home in 2013, and that got me picked for the Fast Track Paralympics squad for Rio. I used to race in Europe, and we’d do time trials at home as well. I was in Barcelona, Switzerland and France.

“I had been training for four years but I got sick in 2015. I got Septicemia and I had to give up. What happened was that I couldn’t get back up to fitness in time to qualify for Rio, so the next fella in line got my place on the team, so that was the end of that.

“It was brutally disappointing. I didn’t fancy doing 4 more years of that intensive training. I still do a bit of hand cycling but it’s purely for fitness and enjoyment, there’s no more competing”.

With his dreams of competing in Rio destroyed, Paul decided to take a different route in life and found himself back in college doing a Mechanical Engineering Degree. It was here, at Tralee IT, that he was introduced to wheelchair basketball for the first time. It started out as a bit of craic, but soon Paul’s competitive nature kicked in.

“After I gave up the cycling I decided to go back to college”, he explained.

“I didn’t want to do any sport for a while anyway. The basketball started out as being a bit of fun, but like everything else the competitive side takes over and you want to start winning. I’ve three years down of my degree now and have one to go.

“We’re still a fairly new team, but we are up against teams that have been playing it all their lives. We are improving, and bit by bit we are getting there. What we are really short of is a full time coach. It’s hard to get someone to commit, there’s a lot of travelling between going to Belfast and Dublin, we are all over the country like. We need to have a coach that can travel with us to the games. It’s a big commitment for little reward”.

Interestingly, it wasn’t until a tragic car accident in 2002 that Paul first discovered his interest in sport. He hasn’t looked back since, and he is determined to get as much out of life as he possibly can.

“I was in a car accident in 2002 when I was a back seat passenger in the car. I spent 4 months in the Mater in Dublin in the spinal unit, and I spent about 7 months in rehab in Dun Laoghaire after that. It was in Dun Laoghaire that I was first introduced to sport and I’ve had a great love for it since.

“I was far from sporty when I was younger, it was more like drink and fags! It wasn’t until I started doing the cycling that I learnt that you’d feel better about yourself by doing sport. Like the saying goes, you have to be young and stupid, before you are old and wise”!

Johnny Quaid

JOHNNY Quaid was 17 years old when he set off to work one bright breezy morning. Little did he know that when he left his house in Athea, his life was to take a turn in a completely different direction.

“I was 17 when I fell. That’s 14 years ago now. I fell off a scaffolding on a building site. We were working on a roof. I went from Kerry to the Mater Hospital; I was there for a few weeks and from there I went to Dun Laoghaire, and I was there for four and a half or five months. I think that the youth was on my side as well, I could bounce back from it.”

Johnny worked hard to rehabilitate and soon found himself longing to play pool, a game that he had become quite familiar with when he had previously worked in a bar. After initially finding it awkward with his wheelchair, Johnny made rapid progress, as he explained.

“I was always playing pool with the boys from the village. When I had the accident, I tried to get back into playing pool, but it was kind of awkward in the wheelchair. I met another fella in a wheelchair from Newcastle West, he had represented Ireland, and he went to tournaments all over the country and in England. He took me under his wing, and I ended up going to the World Championships for a few years on the trot. I didn’t do too badly, but It was kind of a running joke that I came 14th in the World Championships, and someone would say ‘how many were in the tournament?’ and I’d say fourteen,” he laughs.

Johnny hung up his pool cue when, after a few years competing, a chance meeting in Limerick City with an old friend nudged him on the way to start playing wheelchair basketball with Limerick. The Scorpions were a very good team, and Johnny ended up winning two National League medals with his new side. Now living in Tralee, the travelling up and down to Limerick for training two nights a week was starting to take its toll however, and with a junior club in Kerry already, Johnny could see the potential for a senior team.

“I said that we could badly do with a senior team in Kerry and that was when I decided to put the word out there. I helped out at the start in 2017. I suppose most of the lads that got involved knew of each other already when we started looking for players. We organised a night to meet up and it started from there.

“We had a fair idea of the names that would come back to say that they were interested. Enough numbers came back, and we knew that we could have a go at making a team. Lads came from all over (the county), from Moyvane, Tralee and Killarney.

“It was very hard at the start for Kingdom because when we went to the National League, we saw the standard that we needed to be at to compete. We got very serious with our training to improve our fitness levels, but really, we are still building.

“I suppose I’m bringing what I was taught in Limerick to the team, and with the internet and YouTube, lads are watching their own videos and bringing their own ideas. We have a WhatsApp group and we throw videos in there as well.

“We want to get better. We don’t want to just be making up the numbers in the National League either. The Rebel Wheelers in Cork, and Killester in Dublin, have years of experience, and they are miles ahead of us. We are a talented bunch though; we are well able to get around the chairs and we have speed and height. We just need the experience to match it.”