Bayley McKenna, the captain of Australia’s wheelchair rugby league team, has a particularly grisly way of selling his sport. Basically, he says, spectators at the World Cup should expect gladiatorial-level gore.
“They can expect big hits, finger dislocations, wrist dislocations, shoulder dislocations, tyre explosions, massive, massive bangs and a lot of skill to be able to push your chair, catch the ball, put it on your lap and straighten up and balance up on one wheel,” he said. “It is brutal.”
The Australian side is aiming to improve on their best finish – as runners-up in the inaugural tournament in 2008 – when they kick off their campaign against New Zealand in Wollongong on Saturday.
Named Wheelaroos captain last month, McKenna, 26, becomes the first player without a disability to lead the Australian team. He was introduced to the sport through his father, Darren, who became an amputee in 2006, when McKenna was six.
“I was doing everything with him,” McKenna says. “If he needed the yard mowed, I was helping him with that. Going to the shops, I was always helping with that. I was the only person that he’d actually let push his wheelchair.”
When Darren started playing wheelchair rugby league, so did Bayley.
“We were like two peas in the pod,” he says. “And this actually made us closer. I didn’t even think that was possible.”
Of the five players on a team, a maximum of two can be able-bodied. It’s a rule that can raise eyebrows in those new to the sport. And McKenna’s captaincy hasn’t come without a backlash.
“People that don’t know too much about the sport, they’re obviously divided over it. But once you explain it to people that are on the fence about able-bodied athletes and disabled athletes playing on the same field at the same time, once you explain the way it works, they kind of change the tone a little bit,” he said.
As McKenna’s teammate Liam Luff puts it, it’s not often you get a sport where able-bodied and disabled athletes play together on the same team.
“It’s not just a bunch of more able-bodied people running rampant. There’s guys that have no core control that are faster than me in a chair,” McKenna said. “It’s definitely not one of those sports where able-bodied [players] run riot. It’s definitely not. It’s completely the opposite.”
Like McKenna, Luff (28) was introduced to wheelchair sports through a parent, as both he and his mum have hereditary spastic paraplegia. When opportunities to play wheelchair sports opened near their home in the Sutherland Shire, both tried whatever they could.
But Luff has to thank his high school sweetheart for his career in wheelchair rugby league. The pair attended a try-out day together, and Luff left without much interest in continuing the sport, preferring basketball. However, Emily, now his wife – and who is able-bodied – started playing regularly.
“Being around somebody with a disability for that long, to start to see it through that lens, sport is the great equaliser in that regard,” Luff said. “Everyone gets in a chair and goes, ‘Oh wow, this is what the day-to-day is like’.”
McKenna is hoping this World Cup will open up the sport to a new audience.
“We have such a rugby league-loving country and people don’t really know who we are sometimes,” he said. “So we want to gain access and do that from this World Cup.”
The Wheelaroos open their World Cup campaign against New Zealand on Saturday.
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