Students to benefit from wheelchair rugby experience
Tutor Steven Wills has worked with some of New Zealand’s top disabled athletes, and is planning to pass on his knowledge and experience to others at Wintec.
When Steven Wills returned from a wheelchair rugby tournament in Germany last month he brought back with him a host of knowledge which he hopes to pass on to his students.
A programme manager and lecturer in sports psychology and research methods at the Wintec Rotokauri Campus, Wills spent a week at the Bernd Best Tournament in Cologne as part of the support staff with New Zealand’s national wheelchair rugby team the Wheel Blacks.
“I was the manager for the team, I was involved in running the bench in the games, helping the players off the court and with their preparations,” Wills said.
The competition, which is the largest of its kind in the world, brings together club and international teams from every corner of the globe and proved a worthy testing ground for the Kiwi squad dubbed Te Waka Hou (The New Canoe.)
“They came fourth overall out of 46 teams, it was a club tournament but national sides came along.
“When they went two years ago in 2011, they didn’t win a game. This time they won two games against Germany and Austria.”
A teacher at Wintec for the last six years, Wills previously completed a Bachelor of Social Science (Psychology) in 2003 and a Bachelor of Sport and Leisure a year later.
It was through Debbie Strange, a fellow Wintec Sport and Exercise Science tutor and New Zealand athletics coach, that Wills became involved with the Wheel Blacks in 2010, prior to the team’s attempts to qualify for the 2012 London Paralympics
While his list of clients now includes Waikato athletes from a range of different sports, Wills says that working with disabled athletes is a unique and valuable experience.
“They take a lot more time for everything, getting ready in the morning, getting places so you have to be a lot more patient and understanding.
“You still have to have high expectations of them and they also have high expectations of themselves.”
However, the skills he brings back from tournaments such as the Bernd Best are also able to be passed on to his students and colleagues at Wintec.
“All these things contribute to knowing more about the different aspects of sport, having an experience like that, not many tutors or sports science people go away with paralympians.
“It’s definitely something new, if you think about peoples’ exposure to tetraplegics most wouldn’t have any idea.”
The New Zealand wheelchair rugby athletes are now settled into their domestic season, but Wills expects to be involved in their monthly training camps and end-of-year tournament in Australia as well as the Oceania championships in South Africa.
You can learn more about wheelchair rugby here.
