Wheelchair Rugby: How Leeds Rhinos Foundation 'opened doors for all' in truly inclusive sport

Wheelchairs lay scattered across the entrance to the sports hall, some intact, others in bits, the metal hot to the touch in the airless sauna of the gymnasium.

Ed Bates, Leeds Rhinos Foundation’s disability and inclusion co-ordinator, hurries round with a spanner in hand, fixing and amending chairs, transforming what at first looks like a salvage yard into a well-oiled pitlane garage.

James Simpson MBE walks past on his prosthetic legs, the doyen of wheelchair rugby stopping to chat with a member of the Leeds Rhinos team that won the Super League Grand Final last year, and then onto a young woman who is partially sighted and will train in the hour before the senior team’s session commences, as part of the development and recreation squad.

“We’re trying to get it changed to a winter sport,” Simpson tells me as he mops his brow. He is leading both sessions in his role as head coach of the Rhinos wheelchair programme.

But not until he has received an award from Bob Bowman, ceo of Leeds Rhinos Foundation, who has accepted on his behalf an honour at the recent Leeds Sports Awards. This latest acknowledgement of Simpson’s position in the wheelchair rugby and Leeds sporting landscape is a fitting accolade for not just himself but the Leeds Rhinos Foundation as a whole, one that as it celebrates its 20th year this summer, is growing well beyond the realms of the all-conquering, able-bodied rugby league team of Sinfield, Burrow and Peacock.

“The wheelchair element was initially just about playing at the elite level, and as the Rhinos, we want that elite success,” begins Bowman.

“But success for us now is all about the community development and junior sections etc, and there’s a number of young people here tonight who have got disabilities where sport was previously closed to them. At Leeds Rhinos Foundation we’re all about changing lives through the power of sport. It’s about providing opportunities. The door’s not shut any more, the door’s open.”

At every turn in that training session there is an example of what Bowman is talking about.

Like Rachel, 27, who is disabled: “It’s the only sport that gives me an equal footing with the rest of my peers,” she says before swinging her chair around and resuming an attack versus defence drill.

Like Charlie and Cameron, two mates who attend Castleford Academy School.

Cam is disabled. Charlie is able-bodied and a mad cricketer, but on the suggestion of his teacher – and Rhinos team manager Karen Collins – found wheelchair rugby. “It’s nice that I can finally do a sport with my mate,” says Charlie, who has taken to it so much he has bought his own rugby wheelchair.

Collins has been team manager for years, and has also worked voluntarily with the England squad.

“There’s lovely stories everywhere,” she says as she looks around the sports hall.

“Cameron and Charlie had never been able to play sport together, now they can.

“We’ve got two sisters from Wakefield who are deaf. A girl called Hannah is visually impaired, registered blind, so we play with a coloured ball and have to have someone next to her talking her through the processes. In a match we use a flag system, I’ll stand behind a line and use a flag to tell them when six tackles are up etc.

“We have a transgender athlete. They emailed me one day just asking ‘will you have me?’ Now they’ve said: ‘Thank you for showing that I can do this. I’m transgender and I’ve found sport again’.

“We adapt things as much as we can so that everyone can play. It’s about having a can-do attitude.”

But the door is also open to able-bodied athletes like Ben, 52, from Pudsey, who until seeing wheelchair rugby on television during the delayed 2021 Rugby World Cup, had been an individual sportsman in martial arts. “A few of us thought let’s find out how we can give this a go,” he says. “Came down two years ago and I’m still here. I love the speed and the skill.”

The World Cup was an accelerant to the interest, the shop window that revealed that wheelchair rugby was a sport for all, but the Rhinos Foundation had been building slowly before that.

“It was about five years ago,” continues Foundation ceo Bowman. “There’d been a few opportunities that had come up. Wheelchair was run and co-ordinated by an amazing charity in Leeds called Spider-Y, they grew it to an extent where it got so big they wanted to pair up with the Rhinos.

“We were also sensing the mood within the game, and good on the RFL as a governing body for recognising that we’re not just a 125-year-old men’s running game, we need to develop a women’s game and the sport from an inclusivity point of view.

“So a few things came together but the World Cup really accelerated it, it helped that England won and we have the World Cup winning captain here tonight in Tom Halliwell. That gave it an impetus and a drive and we rode the upsurge.

“People now try to badge it as the most inclusive sport – I’m not too fussed about putting a label on it – what I like to think is it’s great that family members can play together; you might have one whose able-bodied, one with a disability.”

Having good people in influential positions helps; people like Karen Collins, Ed Bates and James Simpson.

“It takes a very special person and we’re fortunate that we’ve got Ed running it,” continues Bowman. “Then alongside him you’ve got the inspirational James Simpson who is second to none.”

Ed puts his spanner down long enough to add: “It’s a phenomenal sport, unique in that the wheelchair offers that ability for everyone to compete at the same level with the same opportunities.”

And with that, the recreational team leaves the pitch and the Rhinos senior team wheels on, each of them brought together by the uplifting sport of wheelchair rugby.

Experiencing the exhilaration of wheelchair rugby...

SINCE I was in the building I had to give wheelchair rugby a go.

“Don’t worry,” said Bob Bowman, chief executive of the Leeds Rhinos Foundation, as he helped lower me into the chair. “It’s nowhere near as brutal as it looks.”

Before I had time to strap my legs into the chair, James Simpson MBE was ushering myself and 16 other members of the development squad into a three-on-two drill.

“Use the tyre to stop yourself,” came a voice from a helpful new team-mate, as I looked down at the yellow tread and put my hands in harm’s way. Gloves. Knew I’d forgotten something.

Within seconds the first sound of steel on steel echoed around the arena as a defender hit an attacker. Bang! The back wheel shot up into the air and I half expected the victim to be flung up into the rafters, but the chair settled quickly, no harm done.

I was up next, on the right wing of the attacking trio. The move began on the left, we advanced in a rugby formation and then the ball hurriedly came in my direction, a defender bearing down on me like Charlton Heston in a chariot…I shut my eyes but heard or felt nothing. Opening them revealed my opponent already having wheeled around me.

Fifteen minutes after first dropping into the chair, I was playing a game. And a competitive game at that. The speed at which the chairs move, the close proximity of the action and the velocity with which they can hit each other, means all games of wheelchair rugby are competitive.

Like its more established brethren, the idea is to score more tries and points than the opposition and you have six attempts to move the ball downfield. Tackles are made by ripping tags off of an opponents’ kit.

I managed to avoid high-impact crashes and even snagged a couple of tags, triumphantly raising my arms as I did so. Having been enthralled covering the wheelchair action at the Rugby World Cup, I can now at least say it’s even more exhilarating playing it.