Chris Everett showed it could be done. Annika Sorenstam has tried it. So has Michelle Wie. The University’s women’s wheelchair basketball team lives it.

To this young group of athletes, playing against other women’s teams has gotten stale. Where is the fun when you win every game by an average of more than 20 points while playing your entire bench?

In one particular game last month against a team from Chicago the Illini allowed a mere nine points in the first half. As a fan watching that game, I cheered for the first 13 minutes of the game solely because it looked like the Illini women could pitch a first-half shutout.

As soon as their opponent scored I stopped watching the game. What was the point? The game was already over and there were no more benchmarks (a la a shutout) left to cheer for.

This is not a team, or a program, that settles for dominance, however. Having won three out of the last four national championships and acting as the veritable farm team to the U.S. national team (seven of the ten players on the national team go to, or are alumnus of the University), the Illini women have also begun taking on the men’s wheelchair basketball programs in the intercollegiate division of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association.

And they hold their own.

In wheelchair basketball the fact of whose chair is in front of whose (chair position) is extremely important.

Players can’t just sidestep around other players like they can in the able-bodied game and when a player’s momentum is stopped it takes them longer to get it back than in the able-bodied game.

Mike Frogley, the coach of the Illini women’s wheelchair basketball team, knows how to take advantage of this aspect of the wheelchair game.

“One of the biggest things that allows (the women) to compete is because there isn’t lateral movement or even vertical movement. It all comes down to position. And position is all about thinking.”

The women know the game so well that they simply beat players to the spots on the court they want to get to.

In a tournament against men’s teams from the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and the University of Arizona, the Illini women went 3-2. Their two losses were to Arizona by seven and nine points. In the able-bodied world, UNC might be on top of the women’s intercollegiate division, but can you imagine them beating a division one basketball program?

“It’s intimidating for men to play us. We are really fundamentally sound and we manage to play against men’s teams that are bigger and faster than us,” said Sarah Castle, senior on the University’s women’s wheelchair basketball team.

The fact of the matter is that many men’s teams have become really nervous when they see the Illini women’s team on their schedule.

“(The women’s) level of execution and team play is so sound and has so few errors in it that men’s teams can’t completely compensate for it with athletic ability, using their strength, size, to deal with it,” Frogley said.

Frogley mentioned a conversation with the coach Jim Glatch of the fourth-ranked men’s team in the intercollegiate division in which Glatch admitted he was more nervous playing the Illini women than the Illini men (I guess I should take offense to this, being a player on the Illini men’s team, but I’ll work that out on the court).

The women play the game so well that they will be able to take advantage of every mistake we make, Glatch admitted.

As the Illini women march on in hopes of their fourth national championship in five years, I bid you adieu.

Josh George is a senior in communications. He can be reached at [email protected]