Five gold ASU jerseys whipped around the basketball court in power chairs passing an oversized soccer ball and sometimes colliding.
The ASU Power Soccer club eventually beat the Arizona Heat in two games back-to-back Friday at the Broadway Recreation Center in Mesa.
The ASU team broke off this year from the Arizona Heat power soccer team to form the second college power soccer team in America, said Katie Dickey, a global studies sophomore.
ASU Power Soccer Club team members play in power wheelchairs that are equipped with a large metal guard across the front. The guards are large grills that extend across their feet.
They guide the ball using the guard and every part of the chair toward goals at either end of the court. The rules are similar to soccer.
Two cones form the goals at both end of the court. The goalies for both teams stay in a large black boxes. There are three other players on both teams that can act as both offenders and defenders.
Just as in soccer when the ball goes out of bounds the players kick the ball back in by spinning their chair in a tight semi-circle and hitting it with the their guards.
In Arizona there are four teams: three in Phoenix, including the ASU team, and a community team in Tucson, she said. There are 60 teams nationwide.
“I think it needs to be spread to colleges,” said Dickey, a qualifier for the power soccer World Cup in Paris next year.
It helps to build a sense of community and an “understanding [that] there are other people out there like you,” she said
There are 18 countries in the Power Chair International Football Federation and 3,500 players worldwide, said Barb Peacock, a founding organizer of the sport in Arizona and across the United States for Arizona Disabled Sports. The international federation hopes to be included in the 2016 Paralympics in Brazil, Peacock said.
The sport helps develop a better sense of spatial awareness as well as an ability to anticipate the direction the ball will ricochet, she said
Tony Jackson, a team member and German graduate student, said he loves the sport now but was slow to join because he thought it would be solely recreational.
“I didn’t understand how competitive it was,” Jackson said.
The ASU team is in the Founders Club division, the most skilled level out of the six divisions of power soccer, said Gabe Trujillo, a media and popular culture graduate student and team member.
In 1997 Trujillo caught a cold that turned into pneumonia. In combination with his asthma, the pneumonia caused his right lung to collapse. At the end of two years and five diagnoses, he was identified as the only Hopkins Syndrome patient to have all four limbs affected by paralysis.
This syndrome is a rare form of polio associated with respiratory problems.
Before getting sick, Trujillo said he loved to play sports and power soccer was a new outlet.
“I was able to be part of a team again and I fell in love with it,” Trujillo said.
Currently the rules are similar to soccer, but that wasn’t always the case. The game started in the mid-1990s in Canada as a game related to rugby, said Peacock, an international official of the sport.
The ball was almost 3 feet in diameter and the players would push the ball up and down the court, Peacock said.
In Europe, a game based on passing the ball that was far more similar to soccer was developing simultaneously, Peacock said.
In July 2006, Power Chair International Football Federation adopted uniform rules, which included a ball about a third of the original size and rules resembling soccer.
Members of the ASU team agreed the changes have made the sport much faster paced and more fan-friendly.
Reach the reporter at mary.shinn@asu.edu
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