Paralympic Dreams

Jon Parker was a successful high school alpine ski racer, one of the top skiers at his school, which is impressive when you consider that the school he went to combined academics with intensive ski training. He’d already been to the junior Olympics, and his name was popping up as a top college recruit as he began his junior year. But Parker was thinking even farther ahead than that. He wanted to go to the Olympics.
Then came the accident.
The fall in a high school race required the amputation of Jon’s leg. Suddenly, skiing wasn’t so easy anymore. But then he heard about one-legged skiing, which pretty much is everything it sounds like. He tried it twice that first winter, then most weekends the next. Now, in his freshman year at UNH, Parker is pursuing the sport seriously. And the dreams he had haven’t changed.
“I want to go to the Paralympics now,” he said.
Parker has his sights set on the 2014 Winter Paralympics, to be held in Sosko, Russia. With any luck, he may have another UNH athlete on his team.
Ted Broderick doesn’t have any accident to trace his disability back to. He’s a congenital amputee, born missing his right forearm. He also is an alpine ski racer for UNH, and also has his sights sight on the 2014 games.
Parker and Broderick can take advantage of something that isn’t offered to most other disabled athletes, even those competing on the college level- they train with their able-bodied counterparts on the UNH ski team.
“We ski the same mountains, we do the same workouts, we do everything with the regular ski team,” said Broderick.
This opportunity is given to them thanks to Northeast Passage, which runs the competitive disabled sports program for students, along with a wide range of other programs offered to both the campus and the outside community.
According to Tom Carr, Director of Northeast Passage, most schools keep their disabled and able-bodied athletes together, even the University of Illinois, which has one of the largest disabled sports programs in the country. UNH is unique in that regard.
Believe it or not, Broderick and Parker aren’t the only ones interested in making it to the Paralympics. In fact, their fellow athletes on the sled hockey team just might make it there a few years earlier.
Josh Moran and Taylor Chace are two dominant members of the UNH sled hockey team and, despite opposing stories, mesh well enough on the ice to make the Wildcats one of the top teams in the league.
Chace was left with a spinal cord injury and paralysis in both legs following an accident in a high school hockey game. Upon realizing the extent of his injuries, he took up sled hockey immediately.
“It was hockey again,” he said. “If it’s hockey, I want to be involved in it.”
And involved he is. In fact, Chace is the only one of the four athletes who can say that he has been to the Paralympics already. Chace was a member of the US National Sled Hockey Team that won a bronze medal at the 2006 games in Torino, Itlay.
Moran hopes to join his teammate in Vancouver next year. Like Broderick, Moran was born with his disability, although they are more extensive. However, he has proved to be an elite athlete on the ice. He has been on the US National Team in the past and been on the winning team at the Disabled Festival, considered the national championship of the sport, for the past five years.
Carr says that all four athletes have a “more than realistic” chance of fulfilling their dreams of making it to the Paralympics.