By Brian Zanzonico
Born with spina bifida, Lopez, 16, of Elmont, relied on crutches to get around as a student at Covert Avenue School. When he entered Floral Park Memorial in seventh grade, his legs grew much weaker. Fearful that the crutches would injury someone if he fell, Lopez decided to use a wheelchair. When he went to get measured for it, he met Mike Sengeri, who told him about the Long Island Lightning junior wheelchair basketball team, which travels out of state to play other wheelchair teams.
"I thought it was just severely handicapped kids in wheelchairs throwing the ball around until I went to a practice with my mom," Lopez said at his home. "I had no idea you could use a wheelchair like that."
A few years later, Lopez was on the floor, along with Brianna Copeland, 13, of Elmont and Johani Elhadi, 16, of Queens when the Lightning captured the national wheelchair basketball junior championship in San Jose, Calif., last season. The Lightning will defend their title when the season tips off with an Eastern Conference tournament this Saturday and Sunday at St. Paul's on Stewart Avenue in Garden City.
Wheelchair basketball is as physical a game as traditional basketball. Players are routinely ejected from their lightweight competition chairs, scuffles are commonplace and trash-talking is abundant. The only difference between traditional basketball and wheelchair basketball is that in the latter, everything is done from the seat. Rainbow 3-pointers, rejections, layups, tipoffs - all while strapped in by a lap belt. If a player lifts off the seat or uses a functional leg to control the wheelchair, a physical advantage foul is called.
The Lightning play an up-tempo style and are at times impossible to defend, which infuriates the teams they play from around the country. There is, according to Elhadi, a bias that New York's professional teams have dealt with for years: people hate Big Apple athletes. "We play high energy, which people may perceive as showboating," he said. "People get mad."
Elhadi suffers from osteogenesis imperfecto, which causes his bones to break easily. He has broken a thigh bone in a game, and once broke a thumb on Lopez's muscular back. One of Elhadi's hallmarks as a player is his defensive prowess, which he needed every bit of to help fend off a surging Milwaukee Wizards team in the championship game last year. Elhadi, Lopez and Copeland came off the bench to hold off Milwaukee and deliver the Lightning - and the Northeast - its first junior national championship.
"It was crazy," Elhadi said about beating Milwaukee. "We won. We won it. Just to say you're the best team and be able to back it up ... If I never played ever again, I can say I won the national championship."
Said Lopez: "Winning something like that gives you a big sense of accomplishment."
Said Copeland, the Lightning's only female player, who was born without a tibia and fibia in one of her legs: "It was a great feeling."
But the players said the best feeling has nothing to do with on-court success, but rather the type of person the sport has made them. "It boosted my self-esteem so much," said Lopez, an academic All-American. "I was the quietest person you'd want to meet. I talk more now. I'm more social."
He has spoken to students at Covert Avenue School to drive home the fact that sitting in a chair does not have to hinder your lifestyle. "A wheelchair shouldn't affect your social life," he said. "It shouldn't make you feel you can't do anything."
Elhadi cherishes the opportunity the sport has given him to visits parts of the nation he would otherwise never see. "It opened me up," he said. "It let me travel around, see the rest of the country. Alabama, Wisconsin. How many people from New York can say I'm going to Wisconsin?"
Copeland was admittedly shy when she joined last year, and was nervous whenever the ball came her way. No more. "I see it in her more each time we play," Elhadi said. "Confidence."
But when Lopez secures his legs to the wheelchair with bungee cord for warmups before the tournament, one thing will run through his head: The Lightning are the champs, and everyone's gunning for them.
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