By: Howard Bailey
Tara Llanes’ played the pandemic cards that life dealt her and came out a winner.
Being forced to work out at home in B.C., she can now manoeuvre her basketball wheelchair more effectively, changing direction and turning quicker than before.
The women’s wheelchair basketball national team member is looking to put that to work in Tokyo this August at the rescheduled Paralympic Games.
“So having that time to do that, once I got through months of doing that and then I got back on court, I was faster, and my hand speed was faster,” said Llanes, in a zoom interview on Monday.
“There are definitely things about COVID that have been really difficult but there are definitely things that because of COVID and because the postponement of Tokyo has allowed me to work on — things that I probably wouldn’t have worked on and at least not in the way that I did work on them.”
Llanes’ coach, Joe Higgins, worked with her to customize and adapt exercises while adhering to British Columbia’s public health guidelines.
“I’m lucky in that way, but in the beginning last March, April, May, I was training in my backyard where I could get two pushes in before I hit grass,” she says. “And so we had to rework how I was going to train and a lot of it ended up being a visual thing that I had to do.”
Llanes’ also elevated her wheelchair to eliminate the friction that is present when it touches the ground.
“You just put your two back casters, the two little wheels in the back in a pair of tennis shoes. And then, so it just lifts your big wheels off and then I put barbell weights — I put my two front casters in the middle of a barbell weight. So, I’m essentially floating.”
Doing this almost resistance-free activity for the first half of 2020 was a game changer for Llanes.
“I will see what happens when I get into competition with other people, but I feel confident that I’m going to be a quicker player.”
An optimistic mind set combined with experienced, expert, creative coaching have set Llanes up for greater success in spite of the virus
“I have my coach here in B.C. who used to be the coach of the national team. He’s very well equipped on exactly what I need to do for me to be a better player, particularly in my classification.”