Touched by hope
A boy born without his lower leg learned to play basketball, and now coaches swimming. A boy without a tailbone who couldn’t push his wheelchair for most of his early life, and who thought he’d be dependent on a caretaker for the rest of it, now dreams of winning an athletic scholarship to college and competing in the Paralympics. A man – who was a boy when he crashed his street bike in a drinking and driving incident that rendered him a quadriplegic and killed his best friend – found reason to make the most of being alive and to kick his alcohol and drug habit in exchange for the adrenaline pumping rush of full-contact wheelchair rugby.
No, this isn’t some newfound magical elixir. Nor are we talking about some sort of miracle doctor.
But in the 12 years since she founded Team St. Luke’s – an adapted and wheelchair sports program for the physically disabled that’s based out of St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute – Teresa Skinner has touched a lot of people. Oscar Foster, Bob Hunt and Chad Farrington are only three of the many athletes who say that Skinner has changed their lives.
“Before I met Teresa, I never thought I’d be able to play sports,” said Bob Hunt, who was born with a spine that ends at the midback level.
Foster, 18, was born without a left femur, and he too said that playing sports with Team St. Luke’s has given him a sense of independence and helped him break out of his shell.
“The number of lives that Teresa has touched by bringing sports here is just remarkable,” said Farrington, 36, a quadriplegic who was one of the five original athletes on the first Team St. Luke’s rugby team, “She loves the kids and she’s got the biggest heart out of anybody I know and she just wants to help and make a difference in their lives. She knows that sports is one of the best ways to change lives, no matter whether you have a disability or not.”
Farrington can personally attest to the influence that sports can have on a person’s life.
At about midnight on July 3, 1989, 18-year-old Farrington was street racing on his motorcycle with his best friend riding pillion when he lost control of the bike and crashed.
“I was drinking and driving, and we were going at speeds between 120-140 mph,” Farrington, said. “I didn’t make it into a corner. I had my best friend in the back and he jumped off the bike and died, and I went off a 70-foot cliff.”
Farrington broke his neck in eight places and lay dying at the bottom of the cliff for six hours until a passerby found him the next morning.
The formerly active teenager who’d enjoyed basketball and waterskiing was now a quadriplegic in a wheelchair.
After the accident, Farrington reverted back to the same life of drugs and drinking that he’d led before his accident. He tried some sports, but from the viewpoint of someone who’d once had full range of motion in all his limbs, the wheelchair version of many conventional sports paled in comparison.
“I was real athletic before my accident, but for seven years afterward, I didn’t have anything to do, so I was still drinking and doing drugs” Farrington said. “Everything I did before I got hurt that I did well, I didn’t like to do after I got hurt. Like waterskiing for example, I didn’t like it afterward because I would always compare it to what it had been like before.”
Then in 1995, Farrington met Skinner while undergoing rehab at St. Luke’s. Skinner was putting on a wheelchair rugby clinic and got Farrington to try it.
Farrington fell in love with the sport, and his newfound desire to be competitive inspired him to kick his alcohol and drug habit.
“It was my first outlet for real competitiveness after the accident,” Farrington said, “And when Teresa showed me a full contact sport, I loved it. I like to fight, I like football, I was your typical redneck from Lewiston, so the appeal was being competitive. It’s a fast sport and you hit hard, kinda like ice hockey.”
A recent shoulder injury has cut Farrington’s rugby career short, but he still coaches basketball and rugby for Team St. Luke’s, and in the 12 years that they’ve known each other, he and Skinner have become close friends.
Skinner approached St. Luke’s with the idea of starting Team St. Luke’s in 1995 soon after she moved to Spokane from Atlanta where she’d worked at Shepherd Center, which specialized in the rehabilitation of people with spinal cord injuries.
Right off the bat, Skinner, an occupational therapist by trade, said she was surprised by how few athletic opportunities there were for the physically disabled in Spokane.
“I’d seen in Atlanta just how much sports could do for people with physical disabilities,” Skinner said, who made a trip back to Atlanta from Spokane in 1996 to watch the Paralympics. “I’d seen all these opportunities and the changes that could occur – strength-building and independence and everything.”
Skinner went to St. Luke’s community relations manager Sheryl Brandt, and proposed the idea of starting a competitive sports team for disabled athletes. Over the next few years, she devoted herself entirely to her project and went about securing donations for equipment and getting the word out.
Team St. Luke’s started out as a wheelchair rugby team with five athletes. Today, Team St. Luke’s consists of almost 100 athletes in nine different sports including wheelchair basketball, road racing, powerlifting, swimming, and wheelchair soccer. The team has enjoyed plenty of success this week at the National Junior Disability Championships in Spokane.
Skinner coaches more than four sports and remains an integral part of the team’s day-to-day operations while juggling a full-time job at a rehabilitation services company.
“Every job Teresa’s had over the years, she’s always made sure the job was flexible,” Farrington said. “That’s one of the stipulations of her going in to take the job – that it had to be flexible with their schedule so she could go to tournaments or go to practice with the team. Her life revolves around these sports and these kids.”
From Skinner’s point of view, she’s just doing what makes her happy.
“In just one weekend of traveling you can see a kid change from beginning to end,” Skinner said. “It’s unbelievable. It’s very addicting. And it’s all just from sports.
“It’s extremely powerful in able-bodied people. Multiply that by 10 with these guys. Because they don’t grow up with it, it’s huge what it does. It explodes in their head, and everything is suddenly possible.”