Adaptive sports are for everyone

Seth Miller, 19, planned to play hockey in college before a rock climbing accident and spinal cord injury during his junior year of high school set him on a different trajectory.

"During high school, I played at a very high level of hockey, and seeing that whole side of my life kind of just collapse was rough," said Miller, a Fishers, Indiana, native.

After he recovered from surgery, Miller began playing for the Indy Steel competitive sled hockey team, but he did not envision being a student athlete when he enrolled in UC Blue Ash College's Pre-Engineering program.

Left to right: Seth Miller, Jaime Mazzi, Coach Jacob Counts and Logan Cover. Photo/Andrew Higley/UC Marketing + Brand

'They're going to be Bearcats'

Jacob Counts, a former professional wheelchair basketball player and coach of the Cincinnati Dragons youth wheelchair basketball team, said the need for a college-level program became more apparent as the adaptive sports community has grown.

"We started with a really young group of 8- to 11-year-olds with the Dragons. As we grew the program and as players developed, we started graduating players and sending them all over the country to play collegiate sports, but not keeping our talent here," said Counts, who is now program director and coach for UC Adaptive Athletics. "And for some of them, when they went away, they found that they didn't have that care and that medical support that they needed and ended up coming back."

UC faculty members Victoria Heasley, MeMe Earnest-Stanley and Danny Meyer were among the cofounders of The Bridge along with Counts and connected with Heidi Pettyjohn, executive director of UC Accessibility Resources, to work toward launching the program.

Logan Cover
UC adaptive tennis and track and field student athlete

"We need to be investing in our disability community in Cincinnati, and UC should be a destination for our local homegrown athletes to be able to participate in adaptive sports," Pettyjohn said. "My first thought was, 'The first collegiate disabled athletes in this area are not going to be Musketeers or Norse or anything else. They're going to be Bearcats. They should get to be athletes at a Big 12 school and wear our Bearcat name with pride."

The team grew to include additional representatives from the Colleges of Allied Health and Medicine, student affairs and enrollment management, and in the spring of 2024 the UC Office of Equity, Inclusion & Community Impact awarded a $100,000 grant to launch UC Adaptive Athletics.

While there is no central governing body like the NCAA for collegiate adaptive sports, each sport typically has its own organization structure with competitive divisions for youth, college and professional athletes. UC's inaugural adaptive sports season in spring 2025 will field a team of adaptive tennis and adaptive track and field athletes, competing against about 20 other collegiate programs from schools including the University of Michigan, University of Alabama and University of Arizona.

"You can start these sports with a smaller number of players," Counts said. "So we're hoping to get those programs well established and then look down the line at wheelchair basketball and other collegiate sports that have proven to have a successful model around the country for that."

Jacob Counts, a former Paralympian and professional wheelchair basketball player, is now program director and coach for UC Adaptive Athletics. Photo/Andrew Higley/UC Marketing + Brand

Creating a community and opportunities

UC adaptive tennis and adaptive track and field athlete Logan Cover, 19, was one of the original members of the Cincinnati Dragons in 2014 and continued to play wheelchair basketball through high school.

"I absolutely fell in love with the idea that I could play a sport with people who are in wheelchairs like me and who can know the struggles that I face every day," Cover, a middle childhood education major, said. "Being able to connect with kids my age, being able to play a sport together that I absolutely fell in love with, and for that entire time not thinking about the fact that I had a disability, was really nice."

The Hamersville, Ohio native enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater to play collegiate wheelchair basketball last year, but she said it was difficult mentally and physically being so far from home and her support system. When Counts told her UC was starting an adaptive sports program, Cover jumped at the opportunity.

Victoria Heasley, MD
UC assistant professor, adaptive sports physician and biomedical engineer

Heidi Pettyjohn
UC Accessibility Resources executive director

Providing a fresh start

UC adaptive tennis athlete Jaime Mazzi, 43, is no stranger to competitive adaptive sports as a former Paralympian who competed with Counts in the 2008 Beijing Games and played professional wheelchair basketball in Italy, Turkey, Germany and Australia.

"It's helped my self esteem and independence and created a community and a fellowship with other people with disabilities that I can talk to about my disability and how to just navigate life being disabled and have people that understand how it is and what it's like," he said.

After retiring from professional wheelchair basketball, Mazzi said he struggled to find purpose and what was next for him in life. Counts brought him on the Cincinnati Dragons coaching staff, and the two helped lead the high school team to a championship, but Mazzi was still searching for his next step.

When UC adaptive sports got the green light, Counts immediately thought of recruiting Mazzi.

"I knew Mazzi had never finished his undergraduate degree, so he was one of the first people I thought of when starting our tennis team," Counts said. "Mazzi is a bit of an untraditional recruit, but I knew he would set a good example for our younger athletes in terms of how to train to learn a new skill and then the level of work it takes to maximize how good you can get at a sport."

Mikiahya Greene
UC adaptive track and field recruit

Mazzi is now enrolled at UC, studying substance abuse counseling in the classroom and learning the ins and outs of adaptive tennis on the court.

"It's been cool recruiting other people with Jake and learning a new sport, and I'm looking forward to finishing my degree and getting a job," Mazzi said. "It's really cool to have something to look forward to."

As a former professional athlete, Mazzi knows firsthand how adaptive sports programs can make an impact, and he is enjoying his unique role as both the elder statesman of the team and a relatively new adaptive tennis player.

"I see a lot of my younger self in my teammates and other adaptive tennis athletes in the community," Mazzi said. "Most of them are a lot better than I am and they've been teaching me how to play tennis better, and so it's pretty fun having kids that Jake and I have helped become good basketball players now teaching us some of the stuff they've learned in tennis in how to become better tennis players."

Jaime Mazzi competed for Team USA wheelchair basketball in the 2008 Beijing Paralympics with Counts, and now he is studying substance abuse counseling and playing adaptive tennis for the Bearcats. Photo/Andrew Higley/UC Marketing + Brand

Aiming for a new goal

Counts said it was fortuitous timing for the program to launch right after the 2024 Paris Paralympics, the most attended and most watched Paralympic Games in history.

"For kids that want to take their athletics further, there's not that many opportunities past high school to really compete and train every day," Counts said. "A lot of Team USA's Paralympic Team played in college - so hopefully, as we look down the line and develop, some of those Paralympians are former Bearcats as well."

Mikiahya Greene, 22, plans to enroll at UC in the spring and join the adaptive track and field team, and she already has her long-term goal in mind.

"I would like to make it to the Paralympics. I've always been very athletic since I was younger. I've done a lot of sports, and I've always been really driven when it comes to athletics," said Greene, from Erlanger, Kentucky.

Greene was shot and paralyzed about 15 months ago and now uses a wheelchair.

"I've been trying to get back to normalcy, find my new normalcy, and get into the swing of things," she said.

Counts and Greene's mother have been friends since they were kids, and he helped connect Greene to different offerings from The Bridge. She has participated in adaptive skiing, basketball, kayaking and mountain biking and also competed in the Flying Pig Hand Cycle 10K earlier this year.

"It's super fun, and they are all very helpful," she said. "It's just nice to be able to see how big the community is and how many people are out there."

A high school sprinter, Greene said she is excited to get back on the track and compete.

"I'm competitive, especially with myself, so I like proving to myself that I can do things," she said. "I'm excited to be able to get out there and see that I can do it and then just watch myself grow."

In the classroom, Greene plans to study communications and would like to use her personal experience to become a gun violence prevention and disabilities advocate.

Logan Cover was a founding member of the Cincinnati Dragons youth wheelchair basketball team, and is now doing the same as an adaptive tennis and adaptive track and field Bearcat. Photo/Andrew Higley/UC Marketing + Brand

Becoming a national adaptive sports hub

As UC Adaptive Athletics grows, the program will have the support of experts in adaptive sports medicine, physical therapy and athletic training. Earnest-Stanley serves as the Team USA wheelchair rugby physical therapist and athletic trainer and traveled to the Paralympics this summer where the team earned a silver medal.

Heasley operates an adaptive sports medicine clinic once a month for adaptive athletes of all ages and skill levels. As a physician and biomedical engineer, she helps design and create customized sports equipment for each patient, sometimes with the help of students in her senior-level capstone biomedical engineering course.

"For adaptive sports, it's not like you can go to Walmart and buy a baseball glove off the shelf," said Heasley, MD, assistant professor in the UC Colleges of Medicine and Engineering and Applied Science. "There's only so much equipment out there, and it's certainly not one-size-fits-all. We'll help design something or we'll modify existing equipment, create something from scratch or work with any combination. So we are thinking outside the box for sure."

Students taking courses in biomedical engineering, adaptive physical therapy and athletic training will also have an opportunity to get hands-on experience through UC Adaptive Athletics.

"Adaptive sports are for anyone," Heasley said. "It doesn't have to be someone with a physical disability. This could be for someone that wants to learn athletic training skills or learn what adaptive sports are or play alongside their friend or maybe they want to learn about it because a family member is affected."

Logan Cover, right, said she loves the camaraderie that comes from playing sports with people who have had similar experiences to her, like her teammate Jaime Mazzi, left. Photo/Andrew Higley/UC Marketing + Brand

Pettyjohn said the team plans to also launch adaptive club sports at UC in the near future, with a long-term goal to become a national collegiate adaptive sports hub.

"Now we can say that every student who comes to UC who wants to participate in some kind of athletic program can, and we couldn't say that until we launched this program," she said. "It's really important that when we say all students, we really mean all, and we make steps to include all students."

The athletes currently practice alongside community adaptive athletes, and Counts said he looks forward to deepening partnerships with other organizations and potentially starting other adaptive sports programs throughout the Tristate area.

"I'm really excited because I think we'll be able to accelerate the growth of our own collegiate programs but also the growth of The Bridge, Cincinnati Dragons, Cincinnati Tennis Foundation and Icebreakers ice hockey," Counts said. "There's a lot of neat adaptive sports programs that I think UC being involved is going to give a nice boost to and then in return they'll be developing these young athletes so we have a nice amount of homegrown talent we can recruit from."

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Additional credits

Photos and videos: Andrew Higley, unless otherwise noted
Digital design: Kerry Overstake
UC Marketing + Communications

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