The next G.E.A.R. to Play event will take place Jan. 20 in Ottawa
Christina Swett was in her late teens when a hip deformity forced her to stop playing stand-up basketball and turn to parasport. Now, Swett hopes to help other female athletes get involved in parasport with the Girls Enabled And Ready (G.E.A.R.) to Play program.
Swett grew up playing volleyball, softball, and swimming, in addition to playing basketball in high school.
“My disability was always subtly there but didn’t become a problem until I was into my mid to late teens,” Swett explained. “I had to stop playing stand-up sports after high school and found wheelchair basketball while attending university.”
While in the Kinesiology program at Acadia University, Swett met wheelchair basketball coach and Occupational Therapist Cher Smith.
“An athlete came to one of my classes, brought a few chairs, and we all kind of got to try it,” Swett recalled. “I was terrible the first time. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I met Cher Smith, who coaches in Nova Scotia. She introduced me to her job in Occupational Therapy, and then we went to wheelchair basketball practice that night.”
Swett started playing wheelchair basketball in 2009-10 and worked in the Wheelchair Basketball Canada office as the High-Performance Coordinator, and later the Program Coordinator before Mike Frogley introduced her to the National Academy.
“I played at the National Academy for a couple of years in 2013-15 and then went back to school to do a second master’s in 2015 to do seating and mobility as an OT,” Swett said.
Register for G.E.A.R. to Play in Ottawa on Jan. 20.
Swett is now an Occupational Therapist in London, Ont. and in February 2015, along with the help of coach Chris Chandler, launched the G.E.A.R. to Play program with the idea of broadening the non-high performance opportunities available in women’s parasport.
Before the pandemic, Swett was facilitating G.E.A.R. events every other month and taking a G.E.A.R. team to Defi sportif in Montreal.
“We were kind of thinking of ways that we could make sure that the girls and women that wanted to participate but didn’t necessarily have either the skills, the interest or the experience to participate on that senior level still had an opportunity to participate in a way that was developmentally appropriate, lifestyle appropriate and would not be an environment where they were being encouraged or pressured to compete,” said Swett.
At G.E.A.R. events, the focus is on communication and individual skills, not competition – participants don’t scrimmage and rarely shoot.
“We focus on those, more non-tangible things, the skills that will make these girls more confident and more competitive for spots on our Canada Games teams or even within their own programs,” said Swett. “Skills such as court awareness, communication and individual skills, such as being in a safe place to lose the ball to bounce the ball off your footplate.
“Creating a space where it is okay and encouraged for someone with an upper extremity impairment, for example, to knock the ball around with an elbow, corralling the ball with a fist, or trying to dribble so that they could get the ball into their stronger hand—encouraging those types of things so that we’re creating an environment where they feel comfortable experimenting, and so they’re growing as players.
The Ottawa G.E.A.R. event will be the second one in as many months – Swett also hosted an event at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre in December. A G.E.A.R. event is also scheduled for May 4 in Burlington.
Ideally, Swett would like to hold G.E.A.R. events every other month, focusing on retention.
“If it’s something that we’re running every other month, then a woman could be playing every other month and doesn’t necessarily have to be part of a club to participate if that doesn’t work for them,” Swett said.
“It is really about retaining girls and women and providing them with opportunities to participate in that physical activity and to build some skills that will lend themselves to a physically active lifestyle in general.”