Hat’s Villeneuve named to Alberta’s wheelchair basketball team

By Medicine Hat News on March 14, 2020.

Sam Villeneuve may not wind up playing a game for them this season, but at least he can say he’s on the provincial wheelchair basketball team.

The 20-year-old from Medicine Hat was named to the team after a training camp last month, making him the first player to graduate from the local adaptive sport team to the Alberta side.

“The only games I played was three years ago when we went up to Lethbridge to play a game, then Lethbridge’s team came down to Medicine Hat,” said Villeneuve earlier this month, long before the global pandemic threw every sports’ future off track. “I’ve never played on many teams.

“It feels good. Yes (I was surprised).”

Villeneuve has disabilities such that he speaks slowly and can’t easily catch a basketball. But the second-year engineering student at the University of Alberta proved at the training camp his skill set is more than valuable. He said out of two dozen players who attended, only 10 made the team.

In wheelchair basketball, players are classified with a point value between 1.0 and 4.5 based on their level of disability. The lower the number, the greater the disability. A team can only have a total of 14 points’ worth of players on the court at one time.

Villeneuve says he’s a 1.5.

“I’m able to roll but I can’t catch really well,” he said. “The pass has to be direct, right at me.”

It hasn’t stopped him. He tried wheelchair rugby after moving north for school, “but it took an hour and a half on the bus to get to the practices.”

So he found the Northern Lights club team, which holds practices right at the university campus in Edmonton.

“I called them, about two and a half months ago, they told me to come out to a practice.”

The provincial team was to practice in Red Deer next weekend, but that’s unsurprisingly cancelled. So, too is the junior western regionals that were planned for Kamloops April 24-26.

But Villeneuve can still look longer-term in the sport.

“Team Alberta, I’m not really sure, but if I keep playing and training I could one day go to the Paralympics,” he said.

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