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Wheelchair rugby catches attention

When you are a tad addicted to sports, the Internet is the great enabler in terms of feeding that habit.
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When you are a tad addicted to sports, the Internet is the great enabler in terms of feeding that habit.

There are times television, especially given the often limited scope of sport coverage by the major sports cable networks in this country, when what is on the tube is limited. Sure if you are up to watch replays of past Canadian Football League, or Toronto Raptors games, or National Hockey League encounters rebroadcast from the previous night, the two sports channels do an admirable job.

Frankly watching games from a day ago is difficult enough since avoiding knowing the scores in our immediate news world is almost a Houdini like trick even in DVRing games to just hold off viewing long enough to fast forward through Trivago ads and the monotonous drone of Don Cherry, let alone a game played a day, week, or five years ago.

So when the networks cheap out on reruns rather than daring to offer viewers something new, different fresh, I turn to YouTube.

That has meant watching the U17 Women’s Softball Championships from Panama in the last week. The games had Spanish announcers, so that element was muted, but softball is played at a pace easy enough to follow along as Canada has rolled through early event contests, although in super round play they sputtered. Of course if you enjoy a sport winning, while desired, is not essential if the team you cheer for puts forward a good effort.

Thanks to a reminder on Facebook I also managed to catch Team Canada games at the World Wheelchair Rugby Challenge 2019 in Japan.

For anyone not familiar with wheelchair rugby I heartily suggest you check it out. Yes, I am inclined toward rugby to start with, but this is a sport unique in its own right, and one that has constant action, lots of scoring, and the element of physicality you expect if the word rugby is used. This is a sport I’d mark as must watch if there were a pro league, which makes me wonder in Major League Rugby might one day be well-served by sponsoring teams for a wheelchair league.

Digressing here, although it is something of a natural segue, I feel the same way about sledge hockey. The sport fascinates me, and I find it generally as interesting as the men’s game that I watch more today than I have probably ever, although in my youth I was a rabid fan watching Hockey Night In Canada as the viewing choice Saturday among the two channels we had access too, and reading Hockey News cover-to-cover weekly.

For me, watching a sport tends to be a case of skimming the cream off the barrel. By that I mean I gravitate to the highest level of the sport where there is a Canadian team to follow. So, in the case of hockey it is the NHL. To get me watching other hockey it has to offer something uniquely different – world competitions, the local Terriers, or in this case the sledge version of the game which is certainly unique and entertaining at the world level, the only time I’ve seen the game on TV.

That is the same scenario with wheelchair rugby. You can see the core idea of rugby in the sport, but it is uniquely designed to fit wheelchair play, and it works as a surprisingly fast, high scoring sport that is easy to get into as a fan.