Starting and keeping on

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Noel:
I was introduced to my sport, there was an inter-spinal unit games which is where you’re a newly injured patient, you’ll go down to Stoke Mandeville and there’s a number of sports to try out. I saw the wheelchair rugby, found out that it was for my level of disability only, so I was competing with people that are of a similar disability and thought that’s perfect, that and the fact that it’s a full contact sport, I thought that’s perfect for me. Went back up north and there wasn’t a team up north so there was three or four of us that got together and said why don’t we start our own team, and I’ve gone from there.

Ben:
I started to play while I was still in rehab and just really enjoyed it. I was always sporty before my accident so I wanted to carry on doing something, and to keep at the level that I’m at I want to try and stay ahead of the people up and coming, so that’s my motivation.

Noel:
I was never exceptional at one particular sport but I was a good all-rounder, so I was in school football, rugby, athletics, cross-country. If there was a sport team at school I done it, and then out of school I did BMX racing and karate.

Ben:
In terms of does someone find a sport or does the sport find them, if we think of Noel’s example, he tried a number of sports when he was younger, it was only in later life that he sort of bumped into wheelchair rugby by accident and he really loved it. He mentioned the contact nature of it and, you know, you can see why some people would really enjoy that, and then he pursued it as far as he can. The other part of that, does a sport find a person?

That hasn’t really happened in Great Britain a great deal, but increasingly, as we lead to 2012, there are a number of initiatives where there are people going out trying to find people that have the right physiological and size characteristics for certain sports. There’s recently been an initiative to find really tall people for sports like volleyball and rowing, and there’s another initiative to find talented women athletes for a range of sports. So it’s not something that we’ve done a lot of in Britain before but there are a few initiatives now where that’s being done.

Alex:
I like the training, which is a bit weird, but I do enjoy the camaraderie. You know, I probably don’t enjoy all the 20k sitting on the Ergo or going running in the rain in the middle of the winter and it starts hailing like it has done this year, but I like the sport and I still enjoy it, so if you enjoy it you should carry on doing it. Any sport.

Noel:
Especially when you see people flying around and you feel so slow and so unfit, you think, “I’m never going to get there.” So you’re working really hard on fitness and you’re thinking I need to, to be able to enjoy the game you need to be fit, so that’s probably what I enjoy the least is the fitness. Enjoy the most has to be getting on court playing rugby and that full contact.

Ben:
Everyone has parts of a sport that they really enjoy and parts that they don’t enjoy and we just had to recognise, particularly coaches, that people are motivated in many different ways.

Ashley:
I think you’ve got to be like prepared to go through a lot of things, like winter camp, summer camps in different heats, different people around you, people you don’t like, people you do like, the selection, how it gets selected, because that’s all like in the mind really isn’t it.

Ben:
So it’s all about the, you know, do the rewards outweigh the costs. There are a number of costs, there’s a number of examples we’ve heard about training in the rain in the middle of winter, but the rewards such as you know the feeling of winning and self-improvement and travelling the world, and the camaraderie of doing it with friends and colleagues, you know, that’s the balance.

When the rewards outweigh the costs people keep going, when the costs get too high and, you know, that’s when people start thinking about stopping.

Venus:
If I did something wrong, I’ll do it over and over again until I get it right, so. And then when I went, when I came older, things that I did on bars and I pinged off on them, I’ll just carry on with the routine and then I’ll do it until I can go clean.

Alex:
I just feel like I’m getting better and better and as long as I feel that way I don’t see any reason why I should stop, you know. If every year I’ve just improved and improved and improved, and I think that’s what you’ve got to look to do, all the time.

Ben:
When we think about people who are motivated from within, and I think Alex is a good example of that, he talked a lot about continually improving and always seeking that expert improvement, and he’s been doing it a number of years since he was, you know, 16, 17, 18 at school, and that’s really about what we call intrinsic motivation and someone competing against themself. I mean the outside world sees it all about people competing against others.