Feser wheels to Paralympics
(taken from the June 21, 2008 St. Albert Gazette)
By Jeff Hansen
Staff Writer		    

It’s the opportunity of a lifetime for Tara Feser.

Starting in January, the St. Albert wheelchair basketball player will hoop it up at the University of Alabama.

"They offered me a full-time scholarship to play basketball and to do my masters and I couldn’t pass it up," said Feser, a member of the Canadian national team that will compete at the Sept. 6-17 Paralympics for disabled athletes in Beijing, China.

"I’m quite excited about it. It seems like they like the way I play and they want me to contribute to their team."

Feser, 28, is the latest Canadian to be recruited by the Alabama women’s wheelchair basketball team. She is expected to replace Karla Tritten of Edmonton in the line-up. Tritten, a former national team player, recently wrapped up her collegiate stint at Alabama.

"Their entire team is probably under five-foot-four so they have small players and they needed a big player. They sought me out and asked if I wanted to go," Feser said. "It was sort of out of the blue when they approached me. They sent a team to one of our women’s tournaments in Vancouver and I sat down with the coach and he put the suggestion in my head that I should come down there.

"They want me so bad that they’re flying me in for all the tournaments before January."

Last week Feser accepted a two-year scholarship while checking out the Tuscaloosa campus during a Team Canada training camp at the university.

"It was a tough decision. My husband is staying here so it will be hard that way, but I couldn’t pass up a free masters as well as having that opportunity to play every day. It’s really just amazing," said Feser, who will focus on sports management as her masters.

Alabama plays four other collegiate teams, in addition to some club teams in a league setting. Exhibitions are also scheduled against men’s collegiate teams.

"It’s going to be a great opportunity for me to develop my basketball skills. I will be playing with 15 other athletes every single day. We practise two hours a day, Monday through Friday, and then on the weekends we have tournaments. We’re getting probably 30 to 35 games. In Edmonton I practise with maybe five people twice a week and I get 10 to 15 games."

Feser is a post who is classified as a 4.5 player with full mobility while sitting. She played high school basketball with the Queen Elizabeth Knights but a dislocated kneecap curtailed her stand-up career in the sport. Surgery in 2004 corrected the problem, but it prevented her from running or jumping. She later found out that one leg is shorter than the other by an inch and a half.

Ten years ago Feser’s high school coach and teacher introduced her to the wheelchair brand of hoops. She has since gone on to play club for the Edmonton Inferno, the five-time defending Canadian Wheelchair Basketball League champions.

In April the recreation program manager for the City of Edmonton cracked the Team Canada roster for the Paralympics after serving as a red ace (practice player) the last five years at previous selection camps.

"To be able to play for my country is so exciting."

Earlier this month Team Canada competed against other Paralympic teams at the Roosevelt Cup in Georgia and the North American Cup in Alabama.

"It was a good experience for us to work together and see each other as a group," Feser said. "It also gave us a good look to see what we’re up against and what we need to do in the next few months to get ready for Beijing."

At the Roosevelt Cup the Canadians lost the third-place game by 10 to Australia and finished 3-3 overall.

In the second tournament the Canadians knocked off the Aussies 50-37 for third place in the North American Cup in Birmingham. Feser was the second-highest scoring Canadian with 14 points.

"That was probably my best game ever. It was amazing to see. I was stealing balls on defence. I was stopping their hoops," Feser said. "On offence for some reason everything just connected. It was a different role for me for being kind of the only scoring threat out there on some of the line-ups. I usually pass it off and everybody else scores but not this time."

Feser was surprised by the floor time she received.

"When I went out there I didn’t know if I was going to stay for five minutes or come off in a minute so I left it all out on the court," she said. "I’ve never played as good as I have in those two tournaments. I was a lot more aggressive and really going for the ball all the time. I came back with bruises from head to toe and I sprained my thumb."

Confidence-wise Feser now believes she can hold her own against the best wheelchair players in the world.

"It was a huge step for me to take my game from the national level and step it up against international competition."
jhansen@stablert.greatwest.ca

home
top