Wheelchair Basketball Canada congratulates Team Canada athlete Colin Higgins on being named Sport New Brunswick’s Male Athlete of the Year. Higgins was a member of WBC’s men’s team, which finished eighth at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics this summer.
“It’s obviously awesome to win the award, but as much as it is an award for me, it’s an award for the support that I’ve received from New Brunswick and the people of New Brunswick, whether that’d be my family or people from Parasport New Brunswick or the people that I started playing Wheelchair Basketball with at the club level,” said Higgins. “They’ve all been a part of my journey over the years, and this is just kind of a little bit of an acknowledgement for everything we’ve done over the last while.”
Congratulations to all our finalists in this category, all three athletes had an amazing year, all while navigating a global pandemic! This year’s winner of the 2021 Konica Minolta Sport Award for Male Athlete of the Year is Colin Higgins Wheelchair Basketball. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/VR7mFLo8sF
— SportNB (@SportNB) December 16, 2021
The 30-year-old native of Rothesay, N.B., appeared in seven games for Team Canada at the Tokyo Games averaging 6.9 points per game in nearly 13 minutes of action.
“The year wasn’t an easy year for anybody, but we made the best of it, and Tokyo was very special; we would’ve liked to do a little better,” Higgins said. “But the support that I felt from back home from people that I know, or that I don’t even know, was unlike anything I’d ever felt at any other Games. That was a really cool takeaway from Tokyo, and it just really helped re-confirm why I do this. It made me double-down on why I want to continue to keep doing this.”
On the court, Higgins pointed to the men’s quarterfinals game against Great Britain as the highlight of his first Paralympic experience.
“We were leading for most of the game, and most people had us pegged as the underdog, and just the team really felt like it was coming together, and the vibe in the dressing room was, ‘hey we can actually do this.’ So that was a pretty cool moment there,” he said.
After the Games, Higgins returned to the University of Missouri, where he is a Sports Management student. Though the season has been tough on the court due to injuries, Higgins said he was happy with how the semester went in the classroom.
With one year remaining at school, Higgins has his sights set on giving back to parasport once he’s completed his degree.
“Growing up, I played tons of sports: hockey, baseball, and golf. If anybody knew of a sport, I was around and knew of it, but I knew very little about parasport except for sledge hockey and that was because I spent all day in the rink,” he said. “I’d like to go back, and kind of try and help build the grassroots back in New Brunswick, work with parasport and just build that awareness for people.”