ABSTRACT
This chapter tells the stories of four individuals from the “second generation” of University of Wisconsin-Whitewater (UWW) players that I interviewed. By the early 1990s, coach Ron Lykins and players like Melvin Juette, Eric Barber, and Mike Frogley had transformed the institutional culture of the UWW wheelchair-basketball program into what Tracy Chenowyth described as a “no-nonsense, give-it-everything-you-got” competitive milieu where players aspire to elite status in the sport.1 To be sure, no one expected every player on the team to be able to reach this level, but everyone was expected to work as hard as they could to maximize their potential, both as basketball players and as people more generally. At this point in the evolution of the program, however, a divide between the players on the team and the other students with disabilities was becoming apparent, and as John Truesdale observed, an element of elitism was starting to creep into the program (see Chapter 3). Some of the players in this chapter reveal and reflect upon these social fissures.
