Sabrina Durepos remembers the first time she ever scored a basket in wheelchair basketball.
The year was 1990, and she was fresh out of a rehabilitation centre following her accident. Durepos says she weighed less than 80 pounds when she was invited to watch a wheelchair basketball game.
After the game, she went onto the court and tried many times to score a basket.
Everyone was waiting for her to get one before they closed the centre for the night, Durepos said. And when she did, she was immediately hooked.
“I remember that moment like it was yesterday,” she said. “The next day, my dad and I went to Canadian Tire, bought a hoop, installed it and he wanted to put it lower, and I said ‘No way, 10 feet, I’m gonna get it and I’m gonna make it.'”
Sabrina Durepos, originally from Montreal but now living in Fredericton, says when she scored her first basket, she was hooked. (Submitted by Sabrina Durepos)
From there, the Quebec native and now Fredericton resident spent many years with the senior women’s national team, winning two Paralympic golds and three consecutive golds with the national team at the world championships.
Now, Durepos is being inducted into the Wheelchair Basketball Canada Hall of Fame alongside Nova Scotia athlete Walter Dann and, even closer to home, her husband, Dave Durepos.
Dave’s path into wheelchair basketball started a little differently.
A former high school and college basketball player, the game was all about running and jumping to him.
When a motorcycle accident put him in a wheelchair and he couldn’t do that anymore, he was devastated and didn’t want anything to do with wheelchair basketball.
But a staff member at the Fredericton rehabilitation centre brought Dave to a local practice and all of sudden, pushed his chair into the middle of a court.
