‘Bonded forever’: EWU wheelchair basketball team finishes out final tournament before being cut by the university

Rolling out onto the court Friday morning, members of the Eastern Washington University wheelchair basketball team wore their uniforms with the logos covered by black tape.

The match against the City University of New York Beavers in Phoenix, which the team lost 69-62, was the last the Eagles team will play after a university decision in February to discontinue adaptive athletics.

“We (wore tape) because we are representing each other as a family, not the university,” senior player Liam Frobisher said after the match. “I’m grateful for everyone I’ve met through this program, and Eastern can never tear us apart.”

Educational institutions across the country – including EWU – have grappled with the loss of some state and federal funding in recent years, leading to cuts in staffing and programs even amid tuition increases.

The financial squeeze has affected many students and programs at Eastern, including state grant eligibility for students and federal cuts to programs designed to help students attain an education with the help of loans and grants. Last year EWU highlighted as an example cuts to National Science Foundation grants, including one designed to assist students aspiring to become math and science teachers in poorer school districts.

In a statement on EWU’s website, Dawn Lewis-Kinnunen, dean of the College of Health Science and Public Health, wrote that the decision to cut wheelchair basketball was difficult and “reflects long-term sustainability challenges in a budget-tightening environment.”

“This tough choice is in no way a statement on the value and talent of our adaptive student-athletes, whom we remain committed to supporting during their academic careers at EWU,” Lewis-Kinnunen said. “We appreciate the coaches and players who have raised the visibility of the sport during their tenure at EWU.”

Wheelchair Basketball at EWU began in 2019, and as of 2026, the program was one of only 12 in the United States to be sanctioned by the National Wheelchair Basketball Association as a Division I level. Athletes train, travel and play about the same amount as their able-bodied peers, according to Coach David Evjen.

Frobisher, a public relations major at EWU graduating this spring, said it is his dream to work in the parasports advocacy world. He has played with the Eagles for four years and “would love to play for an adult team” after graduation.

“When I was 12 years old, I was diagnosed with transverse myelitis and was paralyzed from the waist down, so that changed my whole life. I had to relearn how to do everything, you know?” he said.

It was during rehab at the hospital that he first played wheelchair basketball.

“When I was there at that first practice, I wasn’t seen as an athlete in a wheelchair,” he said. “I was just seen as an athlete. And so that gave me an opportunity to be my best self and have fun with it.”

But wheelchair basketball is not a National Collegiate Athletics Association -sanctioned sport due to its low team count, meaning it can’t be hosted under EWU’s athletics department. Instead, it was created as a program within the College of Health Sciences and Public Health, funded initially by donations from Premera Blue Cross and Alliant.

“At the time, the program aligned with our broader commitment to advancing health equity and supporting initiatives that expand opportunities for people with disabilities,” Premera spokeswoman Courtney Wallace wrote in an email statement. “While we have been proud to support EWU’s adaptive athletics program in the past, we don’t have any new or ongoing funding commitments related to EWU athletics to share at this time.”

After donor funding ran out, the program was supported by the health sciences department at an average cost of around $225,000 per year, Evjen said. Next year, the team had been budgeted for $290,000, but Evjen said he believed the number was inflated based on anticipated costs.

“They never told us to cut that ($225,000) down, even though I had asked,” Evjen said. “ ‘Don’t go over’ is essentially what they told us.”

In the spring of 2025, Evjen said the college told him it would only be able to fund half of the team’s budget and that players would have to raise the rest of the money.

EWU Spokesman Linn Parish wrote in an email that the coaches took a grant-writing course and submitted some applications for funding, “in addition to the prolonged, earnest efforts of the university staff to find funding to replace sources lost over time.”

“This decision was not made quickly or lightly, and I haven’t encountered anyone involved with EWU who isn’t disappointed that sustainable funding couldn’t be identified to continue the program,” Parish wrote, indicating that the university had been searching for donors for around two years.

Evjen lamented what he described as a short timeline that he and assistant coach Yunus Butt had to help secure donor funds.

“The thing is, we had always been trying to fundraise. It was too late by the time that we were told that we were able to initiate those ideas,” he said.

In August, Evjen said he was told to stop recruiting for the team. When he pushed for reasoning, Lewis-Kinnunen told him the program wouldn’t be housed in the college anymore, he said.

Lewis-Kinnunen broke the final news to coaches two days after the holiday break at the start of the winter quarter that EWU was cutting the program. Frobisher remembers the following team meeting with Evjen and Butt.

“There was lot of different emotions,” Frobisher said. “I think most of us were, obviously, devastated, but we were also very confused as to why this happened and how it happened so quickly.”

Remaining money in the program would be used to provide scholarships to any athletes who remained enrolled, the university’s official statement read.

EWU President Shari McMahan said that “it’s a super unfortunate thing, and I hate to be in this situation,” but the program was just not sustainable without having secured outside funding.

“But if I have a program that’s losing accreditation because I can’t fund something … I have to be able to support the dean in an academic sense,” McMahan said.

The alternative to completely halting wheelchair basketball opportunities at Eastern would be for the team to form a club sport, which is generally self-funded outside of a voted-upon allotment. Frobisher said a club wouldn’t be able to practically support a Division I collegiate -level team.

“It would just be us messing around in the gym, kind of with each other or with able-bodied students who want to get in wheelchairs,” he said. “And the whole environment would be more like, ‘inclusivity’ and ‘let’s have fun’ rather than, like, an actual competitive athletic team that’s trying to win games and represent the university.”

“It would be more of a recreational thing – which has its place – but that’s not what this team and this group of people want to do.”

Though the coaches won’t be employed by EWU starting this summer, Evjen said he remains “very proud” of the athletes – calling them “an example of what resiliency really looks like.”

“No one quit. No one quit on themselves and no one quit on the team,” he said. “And that really shows the commitment level that they have, not only to themselves and to the sport, but to each other and the family atmosphere that we’ve been able to create here.”

“This group will be bonded forever, no matter where life takes each of us.”