Sarah Adam

By Naperville Magazine
October 2024 View more Spotlight

By Jen Banowetz

Naperville native brings home a silver from Paris

There was a single moment at the Paris Paralympics this summer when Sarah Adam—the first female on Team USA Wheelchair Rugby—took a quick pause during a semifinal game to look around and just soak it all in. “It was a true honor to be out there with my teammates and have ‘Team USA’ across your chest and compete at that high level,” she says. “The crowd was going wild—they were really loud—and I found my family in the stands and looked at them and smiled and took it all in for a moment.”]

Sports were big in her family. Adam was a three-sport athlete—volleyball, basketball, and softball—at Naperville North High School (Class of 2009). In grad school, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, though that hasn’t seemed to slow her down. “Once I had my MS diagnosis, I was looking for something to fill that gap—adaptive sports did that for me, wheelchair rugby in particular,” she says. These days, when she’s not playing for the national team, she’s a professor of occupational therapy at St. Louis University. “If I’m going to go work out or exercise, you know, other people lace up their tennis shoes, and I jump in my rugby chair and go for a push.”

Q: What’s wheelchair rugby?
A: It’s a full-contact wheelchair sport for the Paralympics, and it’s coed, so it’s got both males and females competing right alongside each other. It’s four-on-four on a basketball court with the object of the game to score the ball from one end of the court to the other—which sounds easy enough, but you’ve got people coming in and hitting you as hard as they can and trying to steal the ball off your lap. It takes from a bunch of different sports, like basketball, handball, football, hockey—a little bit from everything—so it’s a sport that a lot of people can relate to when they watch it.

Q: How was your experience in Paris?
A: It was the biggest turnout for a Paralympic Games I think ever. Most games—not only just our sport but others—were sold out. It was really hard to get tickets, which was actually pretty neat to see the fans just coming out in droves, and the whole city was celebrating the Olympics and the Paralympics everywhere you went—there were signs and supporters and people wearing shirts, and I think that’s exactly what we’ve been hoping for, particularly as a Paralympic movement, is to get that kind of visibility and excitement surrounding the games.

The visibility is important, not just for the athletes, but honestly for the everyday person with the new disability whose life has been upended, and they’re thinking, “What next?” To be able to see a community of individuals who are out there doing amazing things at the Paralympics and traveling and competing and back to a lot of the core part of their identity, the way we all have an identity as an athlete. To reconnect with that through adaptive sports and connect with the community of people going through similar experiences is so powerful. But there’s so many people that don’t know that adaptive sports exist out there, that it exists for them, and in particular with females, it’s not introduced nearly as much as an important component of rehabilitation.

Q: This seems like a sport you’re going to stick with for a while?
A: Yeah, that’s the hope. My body, with having MS, is a bit temperamental and unpredictable, but I think for right now I love playing rugby. It keeps me healthy and happy—and not a bad little hobby that lets me go travel the world.

Q: Any advice for someone who wants to be an elite athlete?
A: I think you have to remember your “why.” And if you’re not passionate about it and have fun with doing it, your why has to be somewhat embedded in just the passion for the sport and what you’re doing because it takes it takes a lot of commitment and making a lot of choices to almost live an imbalanced life toward developing your craft and putting your whole heart into it. Just find the joy in it.

Photos: Sarah Adam; Mark Reis/USOPC (Paris Paralympics)