Paralympic Mettle
Dr. Sarah Adam is an assistant professor of occupational science and occupational therapy at Saint Louis University, but her recent achievement is more about making history than teaching health science.
Adam became the first woman named to the U.S. Paralympic wheelchair rugby team earlier this year. And in September, that team took silver in the 2024 Paris Paralympic games.
Eight teams — including France, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain and Japan — competed at the 2024 Paralympics.
Adam played a key role for Team USA. She was in the starting lineup when the team kicked off its campaign on Aug. 29 with a 51-48 win against Canada, scoring six times in the victory. In the final match, she and co-captain Chuck Aoki led Team USA with 14 tries. (Tries are worth one point each.) However, Japan won 48-41, claiming gold.
USA Wheelchair Rugby (USAWR) announced in May that Adam would be one of 12 athletes to represent the United States at the 2024 Paralympic Games. She was selected from an elite 16-person national training squad competing to earn a spot on the roster.
“It’s an honor to be named to a Paralympic team and represent Team USA at the elite level of our sport,” Adam said. “To be the first female to do it, during a time where women in sports is exploding in popularity, just elevates that honor.”
Although wheelchair rugby has been a mixed-gender sport (with men and women competing together) since it debuted at the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney, the sport has been dominated by men. At the Paralympics in 2021, only four of the 96 athletes were female. That number doubled to eight in Paris.
“To be able to compete amongst the best of the best in our sport, particularly as a female playing against mostly men, I have focused a lot on being in peak physical shape,” Adam said. “I spent many hours at the Simon Rec Center getting ready.”
Adam had a unique introduction to the sport as an “able-bodied volunteer” for the Disabled Athlete Sports Association (DASA) in 2013, when she was a graduate student. DASA offers the biggest selection of disabled competitive team sports and Parasport opportunities in the Midwest. Adam connected with the community and attended development events — as both a coach-in-training and a referee.
A year later, after noticing difficulty walking, gripping items, numbness in her hands and bouts of fatigue, Adam was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She began playing wheelchair rugby recreationally in 2017 and competitively in 2019.
Adam describes her style of play as “cerebral,” viewing wheelchair rugby as a large chess match, aiming to always be three moves ahead of her opponents. She hopes a documentary about her team’s journey to Paris in 2024 will inspire others and shed light on the adaptive sports movement.
“I was initially drawn to the combination of physicality and strategy involved in wheelchair rugby,” Adam said. “I’ve found that there is also a great community of athletes in Parasport who support each other not just on the court but off the court. I’ve seen Parasport truly help transform people’s lives by connecting them back to some sense of normalcy and a community of like-minded individuals. It’s a great community to be a part of.”
Adam made her international debut at the Americas Championship in 2022, where the team won gold, and later that year won a silver medal at the world championships. In 2023, she was part of the gold medal-winning Parapan American Games team that secured USA Wheelchair Rugby a spot for Paris 2024. She also became the first American woman to win Parapan American Games gold in wheelchair rugby.
USAWR is the most decorated Paralympic wheelchair rugby program in history and the only one to be awarded at all Paralympic Games since the sport was added to the event roster in Sydney. The United States has won silver medals at the past three Paralympic Games: Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024.
