Wheels of fortune
When Rogers junior Cody Mace heard about the lawsuit a Maryland wheelchair racer had to file to compete in an able-bodied race, he was disappointed.
He was also appreciative.
That lawsuit’s intent, to allow the girl to race at the same time as everybody else, was something Mace does every track season.
“She shouldn’t have to sue,” Mace said. “She should be treated the same, and that’s what they’ve done, treated me the same. I don’t think there’s a difference.”
Mace, who has spina bifida, followed another wheelchair racer, Ferris graduate Tyler Byers, by racing in Greater Spokane League track meets in the same heats as runners.
Wheelchair-only events provided a little competition for Mace on the state level, but he’s still won every event (100, 400 and 1,500 meters and shot put) in his two years at the state tournament. He also holds national records for his age group and ability level in the javelin, and came a quarter of an inch away from the discus record.
It’s the experience of a tight competition with able-bodied runners that Mace said adds some extra drive.
“It wouldn’t be the same if I was out there by myself with nothing to push me or anything,” he said. “Since they put me in there, it pushes me to go faster.”
The opportunity to compete with everyone else was the basis behind 16-year-old Atholton (Md.) High School wheelchair racer Tatyana McFadden’s lawsuit against the Howard County school system.
McFadden, who already won medals in the 2004 Athens Paralympics, told USA Today that competing alone around the track was “embarrassing.”
Washington is one of a few states where competition between wheelchair athletes and able-bodied in the same, or “mixed” heats, is permitted.
According to Mike Colbrese, executive director of the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, the state’s governing body for high school athletics would like track meets to include wheelchair participants when possible.
“During the regular season, if there’s the opportunity, with wheelchair participants and space in heats, then you make sure you do what you can to try and accommodate that,” Colbrese said.
Colbrese still has concerns about safety during mixed heats.
“Sure we do,” he said. “We’ve always instructed, when that is a potential situation, we’ve always indicated that we want to make sure they’re in the outside lanes.”
Safety is one of the issues discussed in a recently released “National Guidelines for Mixed Runner and Wheeler Participation in Track”, released by Wheelchair Track and Field USA.
One of the guidelines asserts that mixing heats is safe “if the wheeler can control his/her chair around the track, follow verbal commands, and all the runners can control themselves around the track, then the presence of the wheeler does not represent a safety concern.”
The experiences of local athletes have fallen in line with those guidelines about safety concerns, said Rogers head coach Bryan Venema.
“We worked with Cody and everyone’s done quite a bit of research, and we’ve talked to Cody’s parents,” Venema said. “And unless somebody’s saying something that we don’t hear about, it appears to be a non-issue.”
At Riverside, Bill Kemp is the head cross country coach and the distance assistant in track and field. When a wheelchair athlete was coming into the high school, Kemp tried to find out what he could do as a coach.
First, the result was apprehension, Kemp said. Now, he said training wheelchair kids isn’t much different than training able-bodied kids.
“One of our chair athletes will have a coach on a bicycle riding with them and the other will be on the track,” Kemp said. “They’re all different ability levels and it’s just like cross country, where you’ve got a kid running a 5-minute mile and one running a 7-minute mile. They’re stretching along with the team and they have different routines. They’re doing their own thing, but it’s a similar thing.”
Venema agrees, saying the only difference between Mace and other athletes is how they get to the track. Mace gets a ride with his parents in a wheelchair-accessible vehicle.
“He’s great. I don’t think anybody else in the coaching staff even thinks of Cody any different than anyone else,” Venema said. “He does the workouts he and coach (Tyrone) Hoard come up with and he doesn’t ask for any special treatment.”
Even though getting athletes into mixed heats has been positive, Kemp said there’s room for improvement.
He uses the example of David Watts, a sophomore at Riverside who initially didn’t want to get involved in wheelchair athletics.
Eventually, Watts started playing basketball and moved into track and field where he broke the national record for his age and ability level in the pentathlon.
“There are a lot of kids that could fall into this category,” Kemp said. “We’re trying to include these kids that could be athletes.”
Some of those local efforts produced eight participants each in four wheelchair races (100, 200, 400 and 800) at Saturday’s Riverside Invitational.
Also, wheelchair competitors will be able to pick their events at the state meet, where previous meets limited them to four preselected events.
Another push is to create a scoring system for wheelchair track and field participants to compete against each other and contribute to the team score. Louisiana is the only state with that opportunity, although no wheelchair athletes are competing in its state meet this year.
Kemp and Teresa Skinner, a coach and physical therapist at St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Center, will be part of a group making a proposal on the issue to the WIAA Executive Board in September.
Although Mace might be out of high school by the time the scoring system is in use, the thought of it excites him.
“I heard something about starting to count our points soon,” Mace said. “It would be cool for future kids that are coming in. … They could score just like everybody else.”