Wheel Men

The 11 members of the Northridge Knights “quad” rugby team play the vicious, hard-hitting, bloody game of rugby in wheelchairs.

But don’t let that fool you. The game they play is as rough as any other contact sport.

The players, who practice Wednesday nights in the Chatsworth Park gym, run their wheelchairs into opponents to stop their progress or block them from crossing the goal line, resulting in spectacular crashes that end with players on the floor.

“If you fall, you fall,” said Bobby Rohan, president of the Western Quad Rugby Assn. and a Northridge Knights member. “You wait for that (able-bodied) person to come out and get you back up. I think they get the biggest kick out of how hard you hit and when you fall down.”

Quad rugby, played by more than 50 teams across the country, was developed as a quadriplegics’ alternative to wheelchair basketball, said David Lowy, the Knights’ captain.

At first, it was called murderball. It became quad rugby in 1981, when it was introduced into the United States.

Quad rugby is played on a regulation basketball court with a regulation-weight volleyball. The object is for the team to carry the ball over the defensive team’s end line. Players put the ball in their lap while they push their chairs, dribbling the ball once every 10 seconds and passing it to teammates by hand.

Their motivation?

“It feels like you’re alive. You get to bang. You get to let some aggression out,” said Rohan.

“It’s just sports,” said Lowy. “It’s what sports are all about, it’s conquering other teams, or losing gracefully, whatever. It’s about being competitive.”