Missing the athleticism, inspiration and thrills the Paris Olympics provided this summer?
You’re in luck — with the Paris Paralympics upon us, more than 4,000 athletes from 159 nations in 22 sports will be competing for medals and national pride. That includes four Team USA athletes from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz. (Find their schedules here!)
The games are also an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the diverse and growing field of adaptive athletics, or sports with modifications in rules or equipment to allow people of different abilities to compete.
Elite athletes train intensely for years to earn a spot on the Paralympic stage, but for the rest of us the beauty of adaptive sport is that it allows people of any age and ability to enjoy the competitive and community spirit of athletics, says UCLA adaptive and instructional programs coordinator Michael Garafola.
“I’m 49 years old and I joke with my friends back in New York that I gotta go to practice,” Garafola laughs. “In my first competitive tennis match, my opponent was in his 70s. That’s amazing!”
Playing and growing adaptive sports at UCLA and the broader community isn’t just Michael Garafola’s day job — it’s his life. You can find him managing and playing for the L.A. Rams wheelchair football team, shooting threes for the L.A. Clippers wheelchair basketball squad, holding serve in wheelchair tennis and organizing events across campus and Los Angeles. He even earned two tryouts for the Team USA wheelchair basketball team for Paralympic competition. But what fires him up isn’t just playing sports himself — it’s providing opportunities for competition, play and wellness for athletes at every level while changing conversations about adaptive sport in the broader world.
“99 percent of us are not going to be Paralympic athletes but we all deserve to play or compete,” Garafola said.
Rediscovering a passion
Growing up without a disability in Staten Island, Garafola enjoyed nearly every sport imaginable. “I’ve been playing basketball since I could reach a hoop,” he laughs. The only sport he played and didn’t like was baseball — “way too slow for me!” After a car accident left Garafola in a wheelchair as a teenager, he had to learn to live in the world in a new way — and while his passion for sport, a core part of his personality, never changed, it went dormant for more than a decade. He didn’t know adaptive sports were available to him.
“It was the ‘90s right? Websites were barely around. There wasn’t a Google to ask, how do I get into wheelchair basketball or what is wheelchair basketball or how do I get a basketball wheelchair?” Garafola explains.
When Garafola did find adaptive sports, he embraced them wholeheartedly and began providing opportunities for others as well. Today he not only leads adaptive sports programming at UCLA — he is the co-founder of Angel City Sports, an LA-wide adaptive sports organization that provides opportunities for youth, adults and veterans to play sports from archery to wheelchair football. At UCLA, if a student with a disability wants to play sports — from basketball to fencing to table tennis — Garafola will figure out how to make it possible.
“Most of us get involved in sports because we want to be part of something bigger or feel like we’re part of a community, and that’s what we offer through adaptive sports.”
Growing programming
Modern adaptive sport got its start in the 1940s, when neurologist and spinal cord expert Dr. Ludwig Guttman, having fled Nazi Germany, was asked by the British government to treat veterans, particularly pilots, who suffered spinal cord injuries. They needed exercise and the opportunity to socialize and have fun. And they were desperate to get out of the hospital.
Pickup games of wheelchair netball (the British version of basketball) began. Guttman saw how sports boosted veterans’ physical and mental health and organized the first Stoke Mandeville Games for these new wheelchair athletes in 1948, opening on the same day as the 1948 London Olympics. Those games eventually became what we know today as the Paralympics.
“What’s fascinating to me is that 80 years later, all these same benefits still exist,” Garafola says. “You can still compete and do the things you love, you know, in lieu of maybe some things that you’re not able to do.” The communities built around adaptive sports still serve many of the same people, too — a number of Garafola’s L.A. Rams teammates are military veterans.
Adaptive sports can also broaden horizons for students faced with a world that doesn’t always have them in mind. “I have a student who graduated that discovered adaptive sports in her sophomore year,” Garafola says. She played in the adaptive program at UCLA as an undergraduate but also took the opportunity to pick his brain about practical things — did he travel? Did he have any tips? “She recently sent me a text from Ireland and told me she always thinks of me when she travels. Because she never thought she’d be able to travel, or drive, or live on her own, and now she can do all those things.”
The mentorship that adaptive sports creates is one of Garafola’s favorite aspects of it. “You’re kind of automatically a coach and a mentor once you get involved,” he says. “You have elite athletes like Team USA wheelchair basketball legend Paul Schulte and he’s willing to talk to you for 45 minutes and answer any questions you have about adaptive sports, disability or life in general. And that’s what's so cool about the Paralympics and the Olympics, right? Yes, they’re there to compete at the highest level, but at the end of the day it’s about community.”
Garafola wants more of these stories, but there’s still a lot of work to do to create the infrastructure.
Garafola on the court playing for the L.A. Clippers.
Serving the adaptive community
Presently, the UCLA adaptive sports program is mostly recreational, although a few UCLA-affiliated athletes have competed in high-level tennis competitions in the past. (UC Berkeley has a robust recreational program as well, with new offerings this year including adaptive pickleball). Recreational adaptive sport at UCLA encourages students with and without disabilities to try new things and allows friends and family from the community to play together. To do that effectively, you need the right equipment, which can be highly specialized.
“If you play tennis, you need a tennis chair. If you play basketball, you need a basketball wheelchair. For running, you may need a prosthetic running blade. As a therapeutic recreation specialist, I often say you can make or break someone’s experience in the blink of an eye, because if you give someone equipment that doesn’t fit them properly, it’s going to affect their experience dramatically,” Garafola explains.
In addition to securing equipment and facilities for his rec athletes, Garafola is also working toward the goal of seeing UCLA emerge as a leader in competitive adaptive sports, offering scholarship-level opportunities as only a few schools in the country currently do.
“My ultimate goal is to support recreational athletes and also build competitive teams so you have the opportunity to wear the UCLA jersey and represent your school at the highest level, just like an able-bodied athlete would,” Garafola says.
The state of California agrees with Garafola’s goal — in-state tuition is being offered at UCs for Team USA athletes that want to train for the Olympics and Paralympics. But creating that talent pipeline requires support at younger levels for adaptive athletes, too. The National Wheelchair Basketball Association has 85 youth teams featuring 1,000 athletes, for example, but that’s nationwide — averaging out to just a handful of teams per state.
“Where it really needs to get better is at the elementary school level, when there are kids with disabilities there, then the high school level and the university level, because there is inequity in sport at those levels and I think that's where we can improve and we have made progress. There needs to be a consistency or continuum of care,” Garafola says.
Having these conversations and gearing UCLA, California and the nation up for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2028 is Garafola’s near-term goal.
“There’s a young person out there right now who can be an elite athlete. I call them a diamond in the rough that we just haven’t found yet. And that’s the opportunity we have with the 2028 Games, to build a legacy to support that person. Providing opportunities for that person and for anyone who just wants to try adaptive sport, that’s the most gratifying thing for me.”
As with the Olympics, Los Angeles will be tasked with making an equally show-stopping Los Angeles Summer Games for Paralympians, too. To achieve that goal will require a collective effort — not just from those who already support adaptive sports.
“I don’t think it’s an able-bodied person’s responsibility to know everything about adaptive sports, it starts with bringing awareness and people being willing to listen and learn,” Garafola said. “We have a huge opportunity with the 2028 Paralympics to build something for the next generation.”
In the meantime, as the Paralymics unfold, fans can cheer on four UC athletes — Hannah Chadwick (UC Davis), Bryan Larsen (UC Irvine), Noah Jaffe (UC Berkeley) Leo Merle (UC Santa Cruz) — as they compete in paracycling, swimming and track. And as a new quarter starts up at UCLA in September, students, faculty and staff are welcome to come check out recreational opportunities offered through Garafola’s program. If you catch him playing basketball or football on the national level, he has just one request for you — boo.
“If I throw up an airball, I want to be booed!” he says, laughing. “We just want to be treated as the real athletes we are.”
Learn more about adaptive sports offerings at UC:
Follow UC Paralympians:
Hannah Chadwick, UC Davis alum, Team USA
View Chadwick’s schedule, which starts on August 30 with Women’s B 1000-meter time trial qualifying.
Read more about Chadwick from UC Davis Magazine.
Noah Jaffe, UC Berkeley, Class of 2025, Team USA
View Jaffe’s schedule, which starts on Sept. 1 with 200-meter individual medley SM8 qualifying.
Read more about Jaffe at SwimSwam.
Bryan Larsen, UC Irvine alum, Team USA
View Larsen’s schedule, which starts on August 30 with Men’s C4-5 1000m Time Trial qualifying.
Read more about Larsen at UC Irvine.
Leo Merle, UC Santa Cruz alum, Team USA
View Merle’s schedule (presently TBD).
Read more about Merle at UC Santa Cruz Magazine.
