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Schools

Murderball Comes to William Tennent

Senior Melissa Nunn and her teammates gave a packed gymnasium a demonstration of wheelchair rugby.

Students at William Tennent got a firsthand look Tuesday afternoon into the rough and tumble sport of wheelchair rugby, a.k.a. murderball, courtesy of senior Melissa Nunn and her teammates with the Philadelphia-based Magee Eagles.

Starting at 11:30 a.m., the team put on several exhibition matches that showed the basic mechanics of the sport and confirmed that many quadriplegics are capable of leading an active, athletic lifestyle.

“I wanted to show everybody that I and other people in wheelchairs can still perform physical tasks and still do a lot of things,” said Nunn.

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Nunn began talking to her anatomy class earlier in the school year about the spinal cord injury she suffered in 2008 while vacationing in Hawaii. She attempted to jump from a waterfall, slipped and struck her head on a rock, severing her vertebrate. She worked with the school and the Magee Eagles to set a date for the demonstration.

It was the power of those demonstrations that convinced Nunn to try the sport out. A varsity softball player before her injury, she was looking for the right fit for her competitive personality. A.J. Nanayakkara, one of her peer mentors at Magee Rehab in Philadelphia told her about wheelchair rugby, showed her the 2005 documentary Murderball and took her to a few matches.

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“I really liked the games,” Nunn said. “I was a little hesitant the first time I played. A couple of the guys were much bigger than me. But I can take the hits, and they don’t let up because I’m a girl. It’s more fun getting hit.”

Wheelchair rugby is usually played on a basketball court. Two teams of four are on the playing field at all times. The objective is for one team to carry a volleyball past a goal line at the opposite end of the court. The other team can use their chairs as, basically, battering rams to bang, jostle and disrupt their opponents.

There are more than 50 teams throughout the United States, and the Magee Eagles currently have 20 members, some coming from as far as Harrisburg or southern Delaware, said team captain Andrew Robinson.

They practice for two hours every Tuesday night at the Carousel House. The season runs from October to February, with the first half made up of two tournaments a month located throughout the country, from New Hampshire to Virginia Beach. After December, the teams play regional, sectional and national tournaments.

“It’s a big commitment,” said Robinson, who joined the team just a few months before Nunn. “Some have been playing for years. They don’t stop. There are plenty of rivalries between the teams. We think the folks in New York are nice guys, but when the game starts, there’s no love lost at all.”

During the Tuesday exhibition, the Magee Eagles offered students and faculty a chance to take a chair and play a couple rounds of murderball. It was clear to the participants that the game is even harder than it looks.

“They were toying with us,” said science teacher Philip Vinogradov, who mixed it up for 10 minutes. “They obviously were taking it easy. It’s unbelievably fun, though. It’s great for this class to see Melissa and her teammates excelling at this.”

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