Title:
Wheelchair Tennis, Adaptive Athletics & Entrepreneurship

Subtitle:
Marty Anderson’s Trailblazing Story

Transcript:

Alycia Anderson: Welcome to Pushing Forward with Alicia, a podcast that gives disability a voice. Each week we will explore topics like confidence, ambition, resilience, and finding success against all odds. We are creating a collective community that believes that all things are possible for all people. Open hearts, clear paths.

Let’s go.

Welcome back to Pushing Forward with Alycia. I’m Alycia Anderson., May is National Tennis Month. I don’t know if anybody knew that, but I knew it because my sweet, Marty is a wheelchair tennis fanatic.This episode is special to my heart, because it’s about my amazing husband, Marsten Anderson, who goes by Marty. He really has been a trailblazer in adaptive sports, adaptive athletics. So I thought, what better? Then inviting him onto this show to talk about everything tennis, and talk about the amazing life path of Marty.

He is gonna talk about how he is a self-taught tech entrepreneur and how he became world ranked in wheelchair tennis, how he represented the USA on World Team Cup, how he started several businesses in the space and he really has been a pioneer in disability sport, wheelchair sport advocacy and pushing boundaries bravely.

He is most importantly a fierce advocate for the disabled community. Fiercer than anyone that I know. He’s the first one to stop a perfect stranger on the side of the road who has a disability, to make sure that they are aware of all of the opportunities that are out there for us to engage in life, sport, and in friendship, honestly. He’s a great friend.

Marty’s journey began with a spinal cord injury when he was two years old, and he’s gonna walk us through his life path of being disabled, specifically a wheelchair user. We tell a lot of different stories on the show and today we’re gonna tell my amazing husband’s story. So I’m really excited. Welcome Marty.

Marty Anderson: Hey everyone. It’s so nice to be back on pushing forward with Alycia. I’m super excited to be here today and I’m grateful that we’re gonna spend some time talking about my favorite thing in the world, besides my wife, wheelchair, tennis, and all the work that we do. And this is awesome because we’re looking to share our stories and this is gonna bring so much more to our audience to listen about who we are.

Let’s jump in.

Alycia Anderson: I am excited too. I’m glad you said that ’cause I’ve been getting some messages. That we have these amazing episodes and we share so much about other people, but who’s Marty and who’s Alycia? Tell us more. We wanna learn more. So this is an opportunity to and honestly, I get the limelight a lot, so I’m really excited to shine the stage light down on my amazing husband.

Can we start from the beginning? Can you share a little bit about your accident, your story from when you’re a little guy and how that has shaped you in your early understanding of disability?

Marty Anderson: That’s a great question. And everyone has their origination story and disability and mine started at the age of 22 months. A little bit before that I was in the newspapers for being the very first son born in a family of all women. At that point I had seven, sisters who were born before me and I was in the newspapers in my local Yorba Linda Star announcing that a son was born. And so that was a big deal. And shortly thereafter I would have one more sister. But in that time I would end up in a car accident. The story goes that I fell out of a moving vehicle. that was driven by my oldest sister and my second oldest sister was in the car and no parents. It was the summer of 1977 and my mom was coming back from the elementary schools. she used to have a station wagon Impala that would be loaded to the brim with all of, her kids and all the kids from the neighborhood that she was escorting home And so she pulled up with all of us just as my older sisters were coming back from high school, My oldest sister was tasked to take my second oldest sister, Carrie Jo back to school because she had forgotten her purse and she had been babysitting the night before and made $10. It was a big deal in 77. Mom instructed them to go back and pick up the purse and also take Marty ’cause he likes to go in the car. And unfortunately that would be a fated trip we. Drove the five miles back up to the school where the girls were going and on route we went around a turn and the story changes over time.

We don’t know if I was going super fast or if we were going super slow or whatever, but dunno if the door opened on its own or I leaned against it and opened it myself. But anyway, I end up on the street. And two older sisters are forced to pull the car over, pick me up off the street.

They say, I feel like jello in their hands. They take me to the closest hospital there was and at which point the doctor said, oh, he’s a goner, and they were giving me my last rights Then I was showing signs of life and ambulance straight over to the closest large hospital that could handle these types of injuries the children’s Hospital of Orange County. And, They stabilized me some more and did all that they could. And then, even airlifted me out to Los Angeles where I was seen at, los Angeles Orthopedic Hospital for all the adults and children and seen by the best doctor in the world at the time, Dr. Stryker William Stryker was my doctor for a couple years while I stayed in the hospital in a full body cast, that’s what they did back then. They put you in a full body cast. They hoped that the bones would heal. There was so much to learn in the seventies about these types of injuries. In fact my injury also spurred another movement or was a part of another movement of the seatbelt laws. And so shortly after in the eighties they had implemented the seatbelt laws and child restraints and all of those types of things. But that was how I got injured. It was a little while before I got into tennis.

Alycia Anderson: Can you explain a little bit how your injury presents itself? Because I think it’s a very unique and interesting disability in the way that it presents itself. Do you mind talking a little bit about just the physiological?

Marty Anderson: Sure. I didn’t quite explain what had happened. I did fall out of the car and spent a couple years in a body cast, and what happened was I was diagnosed with an L one incomplete.

Alycia Anderson: So spinal cord injury.

Marty Anderson: Spinal cord injury. Also known with peripheral nerve damage to the spine. Dr. Stryker would always explain it as if you were to think of a rope and all the different cords that are in a rope, you pulled it so tight that only a couple were left together.

As a result, my injury was really fascinating. It left me in a position where I was able to stand. I had one good leg, but my other leg was totally paralyzed from the waist down and not necessarily totally paralyzed because I could wiggle my toes. And, I could really only just push down with my toes.

I couldn’t lift up with my toes. And I spent several years with the doctors, hitting my knee and seeing if I could get a knee jerk reaction and all these things, the light sensation, the touch. And it was always hopeful that I would be able to regain all my feeling, which has never happened.

I’m almost 50 years old, but there’s so many other twists and turns to my disability from there. But it led me to, basically I had multiple forms of mobility. I could use crutches. They had started building leg braces for me at a very young age. KFOs for people that are in the know which was started in the variety of having a waistband.

And eventually went to no waistband. But it did go all the way up my leg. And there’s other stories with that.

Alycia Anderson: He’s got this really cool picture. We’ll post it when this episode comes out with some of the marketing the progression of leg braces and how the technologies have changed from when he was, tiny little guy to being an adult. And how incredible the technology has advanced over the last, 50 years.

Marty uses a wheelchair today, but most of his life he would walk with either one of these devices, a leg brace that was built specifically for him so he could walk independently and use crutches, which he was, very efficient on as well. And so anyways, I think it’s really important for you to talk about how your disability shows up.

Marty Anderson: Yeah. As a result I really never used a wheelchair growing up as a kid. It was always using leg braces and crutches and hopping and just, Getting around. as I grew up, my mom was always trying to help me get into sports. I was a sports fanatic ever since I was young. I played little league and I did karate and I played soccer, and I did all of this standing up on my leg brace and mainstreaming.

And we talk about mainstreaming, and I think I even mentioned some of this in our ode to our mother’s episode. So check that out. But yeah, it wasn’t until later on in my life after using the brace and doing all these things that at around 11, 12 years old is when I had a tragic accident. I had just had another leg brace built and my wife mentions the photo that we’ll put in that shows all these braces, but one of them, was a nonstop process. As a growing young man, you would constantly need a new brace after six months, nine months, 10 months, 11 months, every year.

It was because I was slowly getting bigger and taller and so I was outgrowing things constantly the whole process required a mold of my leg having it casted from the toes all the way up to my waist. And then an orthopedist would Take that mold and create a leg brace from it. after it was created, it would take usually a couple months of fine tuning it to make sure that it wasn’t rubbing in this area or having issues with that. when I was, at this point in my life at 11-12 I was planning a pretty big summer and I just had a brace built. I had a Boy Scout trip that I was gonna go on. I was then gonna go on a trip with my family friends that lived around the corner, up to Mammoth, then to my dad’s in Washington, and back to a Boy Scout trip. I just had this brace built and unfortunately when I went to Mammoth, there was still snow.

We were messing around and doing snow angels, this and that. I ended up with a pressure sore, And I went to my dad’s. I didn’t want to tell him about it because of so many different things. eventually I got back down to the Boy Scout trip and by this time I had, it basically gotten into gange green, and I was still reluctant to tell anyone because I didn’t wanna spoil any of my trips.

I go hiking out into, the canyons down here in California, and that’s when it eventually is just too much. I’m reeking of smelling death I had to tell my boy Scout leaders what was happening. So I hiked back home. They dropped me off a short trip into the Boy Scout trip and basically I ended up in my mom’s room, laying in her bed, just waiting to tell her.

And the moment that she found me there, she was surprised and didn’t know that I was coming back from the Boy Scout trip so early. Rushed me to the hospital. I ended up in critical care for around six to eight months in St. Jude’s Hospital

Alycia Anderson: Can we talk about that for a minute? Let’s pause and talk about what the little boy at 11-12 gets a sore. And he doesn’t wanna say he doesn’t wanna bother his parents. He doesn’t wanna be the one to stop the Boy Scouts trip. He doesn’t wanna be that one that has to raise his hand and say, this is happening to me.

I need some help. Can you talk about just for a minute, what that felt like at that age as being the kid with a disability in the group that didn’t want to have to do that? But ultimately did.

Marty Anderson: Yeah, that was a tricky time in my life. I was going through all the puberty stuff. I was going through all the things with school. I was going through the differences of accepting a disability as a young person. I had gone through so much already with multiple surgeries and just constant trips to the doctors and building braces and all of these things, It had gotten to this point where I felt like I could take care of it myself. And there was probably a mixture of all kinds of things going on. The reluctance really was just like based outta stubbornness. There was, a lot of mingled things in there with a split family and ending up my dad’s and. didn’t wanna waste the time that I was given with him on another medical necessity.

Alycia Anderson: I remember that as a kid too, is you don’t wanna stop your life to have to deal with your disability, and you reject it, especially that age. I think you hit it on the nose that like 11, 12, 13, when adolescents start to kick in and you’re really emotionally having. Different feelings about your disability, and so I’m sure that was just a really hard time then and there.

Like who wants to stop having fun to have to go deal with something that nobody else has to around you?

Marty Anderson: Yeah. No, it was definitely a huge moment in my life, and there are so many lessons that come out of it. Number one is it’s so important to share when things are going wrong.

So important to tell people when you need help. It’s so important to be an active part of your advocacy for yourself. Number two. It ended up with one of the greatest things in my life happening in that, as a result of me just using leg braces and crutches and all these things, wasn’t aware of all the great things that were happening around me as far as proximity, living in Orange County with wheelchair tennis being founded in the late seventies and all these things.

And so as I’m going through rehab at St. Jude’s. One of the rehabilitation specialist tells me, Hey, there’s this thing called wheelchair tennis I’ve heard of that’s happening out in Pomona the arrow Park area. And it was through Casa Colina Rehabilitation Hospital their program.

Alycia Anderson: And so I heard about wheelchair tennis, and that gets us back to on track what this episode is.Thank you for sharing your story, Marty. I think it’s really important for our community to hear about it. I think it’s important for the parents who tune into this to also hear that. Your little ones, they’re gonna potentially sometimes wanna hide stuff from you because they just don’t wanna deal with it.

And so it’s just something to be really cognizant of and open about. And so I think that was beautifully said. Okay, so you’re first introduced to wheelchair tennis at that time.

Marty Anderson: There’s all kinds of things happening around this whole story, and we’ve alluded to some of it. And let me just reinforce for the facts of dad left when I was about five years old, and I was his only son. It was heartbreaking for him. There was all kinds of things going on in his life.

He had alcoholism and he was a business owner and things, and it just ended up that my parents broke up I get into wheelchair tennis that comes into play. I’m dealing with a family that doesn’t have a lot of funds, extra funds for all kinds of things. Mom is desperate to help me, grow up and do the things that I want to as I alluded, she’s gotten me into sports and little league and soccer and karate and all these things, and now there’s wheelchair tennis. And in wheelchair tennis, you have a major issue with equipment that costs a lot of money to get involved in the sport.

Now, I had never had an everyday wheelchair, let alone a sports wheelchair. so when I started playing wheelchair tennis, was basically just going out to Pomona to see what it looked like and not really know if I was gonna have a chair, if I was gonna do anything. And, I remember getting there and there’s 30 people in wheelchairs running around and one of them was kind enough to like, let me use their wheelchair and let me sit in and try it.

And next thing I’m just hooked. I love it.

Alycia Anderson: Competing.

Marty Anderson: competing and it turns into wanting to go out there twice a week to Pomona, which was 30 miles away from my house.

It’s that rush hour you gotta get from Orange County to Pomona at four o’clock. So it’s not a fun experience but I would go from four o’clock till about nine 30 at night. And play tennis for five, six hours and it was awesome. I was lucky enough to meet some people in the sport.

And this is where maybe my advocacy comes and my giving back and my attitude is because found that wheelchairsports was a place where people just cared about each other and they would step up and do things out of the normal to help and make sure that there was opportunity

Alycia Anderson: You know what, Marty, what you just said was when you went out there, somebody was kind enough to let you use a chair. You do the exact same thing to every single person that crosses our paths and everything that you’re doing with Adaptive Athletics Association, which I know we’re gonna talk about, but I feel like you learned all of those things at a very young age from these other people who were open to helping you.

Which is, one of the hugest part of advocacy is giving back to others, empowering them to move forward and then pay it forward too, so that’s really beautiful.

Marty Anderson: percent.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah.

Marty Anderson: And I found that in guys like Darren Scheidt and Lance Toguchi, Joe Babakanian and Michael Kamoguchi, Anthony, Laura so many people out there that were just a part of this group. And one of the biggest of all was Dr. Horace Warner, who would end up becoming my very first doubles partner. And it was a funny thing at our clinic because he was the oldest one there and I was the youngest one there. And it was Dr. Horace Warner starting wheelchair tennis at 77. And I was just getting out there at 11-12,

Alycia Anderson: that’s a beautiful thing right there too for our community to know. Like wheelchair tennis and adaptive sports can be played at any age, and Horace made it quite far on the tour, even though he started at 77. So it’s never too late to try something.

Marty Anderson: Yeah. And so Horace was traveling from Marietta down the 15 and he would swing out and pick me up on every Tuesday and Thursday. And drive out to Pomona from there. Then he would come back, drop me off in Orange County in Yorba Linda, and then drive out to Murietta.

Alycia Anderson: Marty, you take it from lessons,

Start competing on tour, you achieve incredible success.

Marty Anderson: Let me share a little bit about the environment of that early stage. And this is Southern California in the mid to late eighties, the founder of the sport had just been going through everything in Mission Viejo. Alycia, we talk about, it was the first junior to play with Brad Parks. Brad’s been on here, you can go back and listen to his episode. so here we are, that first generation of children that are like getting involved in this first generation of adults and everybody playing. And in Southern California, we had a hotbed. We had the perfect weather. We had the great numbers of people. There was so many people playing wheelchair tennis in San Diego and in Orange County and in Pomona, all the way, San Gabriel all the way to Los Angeles and beyond.

Out to Santa Barbara, and all over. And we had tournaments in La Habra, Huntington Beach, Pasadena Santa Barbara, up and down San Diego, Irvine. There was literally 10 to tournaments in the southern California area. so as I get back to my mom and my poor mom suffering to try to get me to do all these things, it was tough for me. Because we didn’t have money for entry fees, we didn’t have all these things. We didn’t have all the equipment. And here I am burning through tires and burning through rackets and burning through clothes and the shoes And so it was tough to get in there, but I did and I started excelling.

And before you know it, I was winning every tournament. I was moving my way from D’S to C’s, to B’s, to A’s, Here I am now nearing my senior year of high school I had leveraged wheelchair tennis to be so embedded in my life that I was able to not have to go to PE classes during high school because I was getting enough hours every week at the clinics In Pomona and all the extracurricular weekends I was doing. And so it became a part of my, I guess IEP even though I really never did an IEP to just not do pe I had become a sports editor at my newspaper and I was doing all these things. I was writing about it, I was talking about it, I was doing it, and it was important to me.

And here I am at high school and we’re playing the US Open. is at the Irvine Racquet Club Irvine, California. And Brad Parks had organized all these things and there was hundreds of players coming from all over the world. You’d have hundreds of able-bodied volunteers running around and tent set up and just so much commotion going on.

And, so essentially I’m starting right after. Randy Snow and Brad Parks go for a decade of fighting each other in the US Open. And then guys like Steve Welch are just showing up on the scene. He’s competing against people like Jim Black and

Alycia Anderson: And to clarify who these people are because. a lot of people won’t know is they were the top ranked players in the world in wheelchair tennis at that point.

Marty Anderson: Yeah, and this is an important part of the story because this is all the foundational things that are happening in my life. I’m very much a part of this inaugural generation of wheelchair tennis players. And I’m talking about guys like Mike Watson, Michael folks all these old generation players that were starting things all over in Southern California.

Alycia Anderson: So how far did you make it?

Marty Anderson: so I end up winning the US Open as a senior in high school in the men’s A division. And so for today’s age, children that are playing wheelchair tennis, they’re thinking, wow, I’ve got a shot to become a professional. I should go on tour because can play all over the world and I can play in grand slam tournaments and I can represent my country and I can do all these kinds of things.

Alycia Anderson: they can get scholarships to go play

Marty Anderson: To go

Alycia Anderson: at college.

Marty Anderson: and the

Alycia Anderson: Yeah.

Marty Anderson: will send them all over. And there’s even, intercollegiate play at this point

Alycia Anderson: So I wanna read a little can I?

Marty Anderson: sure.

Alycia Anderson: You were ranked number three in the United States,

Marty Anderson: number three right now on the.

Alycia Anderson: oh and still ranked number 43 in the world. You made it to, you played for team USA, you went to World Team Cup in Turkey Antayla Turkey. Talk about some of your accomplishments from this little boy into the professional stage.

Talk about that for a minute.

Marty Anderson: And that’s where I was leading with this story about high school and making that decision. And I ended up hanging up my rackets. I went to college and I was like, I can’t play anymore. And I’ve gotta focus on my life. I’ve gotta become an adult, blah, blah, blah. when I went to school, it was like. This big hole in my heart. There was no longer this thing that I could do that was bringing me so much, confidence and all these things. But as a result, I’m going to school and I’m telling everybody about what I did. Everybody Oh yeah, it’s awesome. Literally that’s 1994 to let’s say 1999.

Five years of me squandering around wondering what I’m doing, going from school to school, trying to find my degree. But I get back to a point where now working with one of the guys that I had gone to school with at University of San Diego. We end up wrapping up a stint at a company where on the NASDAQ stock market and we’re sitting on a little bit of cash and some time off.

And my buddy’s a senior programmer and I’d been getting into programming and turned into an opportunity us to start my first business in wheelchairsports. And that was chairsports.com

Alycia Anderson: And what I love about this, before you say what chairsports.com was, there was a progression in your story in school. From becoming a tennis player and in that interim also starting to write for the paper in sports and like starting to do work place coming of age through your sports as well, which is really cool.

And this is a translation of that as well, where you started your first business. That was sports related, adaptive sports related. Showing our community again, that these things, like even if you’re not Marty and you don’t make it to the US team. There’s foundational lessons and major impactful things that you can learn from getting involved that translate into careers.

Yeah, this is actually from my want and desire to still, to do that. At this point in my mid twenties and, I am like knowing that there was this huge tennis movement going on and I had been separated it now for about four or five years, but I tell my buddy that’s the senior programmer, I say, look man, there’s this tour out there and nobody’s covering it.

Marty Anderson: Nobody’s doing anything. We could be the first ESPN, we could be the first Sports Illustrated for wheelchairsports, and we can go out there and we can build this platform to really blow up wheelchairsports. And so that’s what we did. And we went to Nevada, we started the company, we bought a travel trailer.

We got our IDs, we got our personal mailbox. We founded everything in a day. And we’re on the road from Vegas to Baton Rouge with our travel trailer and my truck that I had just been leasing when I got the job at B2B stores. And so we take off and we get to Boca Raton, Florida within 36 hours. Trading shifts driving, and we get out there and we’re at the Florida Open, which is the biggest tournament besides the US Open in the country at the time. It was held at a place called Patch Reef Park and Bruce Karr and all of the people in Florida had been organizing it. There was hundreds of players coming out there, and we start doing this stuff with Ricky Mollier and David Hall battling it out in the finals and all kinds of, like this new generation of the next professional tennis player and. I’m bringing player profile forms and a roll of stickers and taking notes and creating statistics and pictures and writing stories, and building a database driven website that was focused on sharing stories about wheelchair tennis. And I’m playing top of it a competitor. I’m like, hey, this is part of the deal I can get in there, I’ll talk to the athletes. I’ll get my foot in the door with them. We’ll have all the access to the tournament because I’m playing. And this became a thing for me and my partner for three or four years. All of a sudden we’re on the wheelchair tennis tour in the United States, driving from city to city, covering the events and writing and taking the pictures and putting it all up online.

And we had. pounded the pavement and we’re beating the doors down at the USTA and the ITF telling them, Hey, you guys aren’t doing enough. And there was this huge push and we had brought 30,000 people a month coming to the website off of just our own fortitude and knowledge and all these things.

Alycia Anderson: What’s cool about this story is this was pre Silicon Valley

Marty Anderson: It was pre-Facebook..

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. And what’s really great about this story is, and you can talk about what your inspiration was for creating a company like this, but from an outsider looking in, it seems like the media representation. And network platform was something that just wasn’t out there for the disabled sports community at all.

And you were one of the innovators of these types of ideas back in the nineties, which is pretty awesome.

Marty Anderson: because I had been denied so much in my life and I had grown up with so little. I had grown up with a mom that had to advocate and show me how to communicate and to take advantage of and all throughout this time, see that I’ve had a series of stories in the Orange County Register in the Los Angeles Times in different areas. I was one of the only people in the United States to complain in 2009 when they didn’t have a US Open for the very first time since 1980 and, I had a story written in the paper, no place to play and these types of things were affecting me, right? But that was after my run with chairsports because literally I went on the road with chairsports for five, six years and we had beaten our heads against the wall.

Me and my partner were living in a country farmhouse out in the middle of Tennessee. With no refrigerator, just natural stuff. And we’re used to it as a little hub to get from city to city and come back and check in at this little, like

Alycia Anderson: Let me help here. Okay, so the chairsports story.

Marty Anderson: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: Amazing, innovativeHow does that inspire you? Okay. To create. What you have today, which is the Adaptive Athletics Association. This is a more modern today platform and community that you are building through this nonprofit.

As we’re like getting towards the end of this interview, I really want you to focus on where we are today with adaptive athletics, the goals of it. How it serves our community. So whoever wants to get involved can, because chairsports was the beginning, but adaptive athletics is today. So can you talk about what.

Marty Anderson: Lemme just wrap up that quick end to this and get to this because what happened is after chairsports, I took a hiatus and then I went back and played for myself without doing any work in the chairsports world. And that’s when I became the highest level I ever was. Up to 43 in the world. I represented the USA at World Team Cup.

I go to Antayla Turkey and as I’m coming back from all of these achievements. a group of friends out in Palm Springs that says, we’re starting a tennis tournament and we want you to help us. And we’re starting a new nonprofit called Adaptive Athletics Association. And so that’s where we are today is as I come back and I become a founding member of Adaptive Athletics Association.

Alycia Anderson: This has evolved since 2009 when we founded and we started doing tournaments at Mission Hills Country Club. We started building this brand of doing it better and bigger for the sport, which was a hundred percent what I wanted. so we took it and we created the first tennis tournament at the Indian Wells Tennis Gardens. We ran several tournaments at my home country club in Yorba Linda, and then you and I got married, Alycia, and that changed a lot of things for adaptive athletics as well as our sports and stuff. And we relocate from Southern California to Northern California and we’re slowly shedding all the original founding members of the Adaptive Athletics Association who have walked away. I’m holding onto the dream and I’m carrying it with me and you and Tom Ayala and me and Anthony, Laura, and a few of the guys had held on until Anthony passes away. And Tom and you and I are the only ones left and we’re holding it and then I’m turning it into a re envisionment chairsports.com, but doing it all on my own. And building a new network of, look, need to be able to give back to our community the opportunity, the gateway to get into the sports. What is the history? Who are the people that need to you need to get a membership with? Where can you find the calendar? Who are the top ranked

Give me your elevator pitch, Marty. What is Adaptive Athletics Association website and platform today? How does it serve our community?

Marty Anderson: The website we’ve built at AdaptiveAthletics.net enables. People with disabilities, friends of people with disabilities, family members professionals in the network that are coaches, teams, organizations, et cetera. opportunity to sign up, create an account, share some statistics about disability that they relate to. Then also for them to list organizations, list events. Create profiles for themselves so that they can start to get to know each other in the community, and you can share stories and there’s a calendar of all the events. But not only are we covering wheelchairsports this time with adaptive athletics, but we’re opening this gateway to all adaptive sports, whether it’s Special Olympics, deaf Olympics. Wheelchair Paralympics or any other sport. And it doesn’t have to be just the professional level sports. If you’re doing something that’s an adaptive sport in some way and nobody else is doing it, share it on adaptive athletics. We’ll put it up there as a sport. Give us the history, give us the rules, give us what, how to get involved, and that’s what adaptive is turned into.

Alycia Anderson: So what I’m hearing. Is it is an association, a nonprofit that is a go-to resource for discovering, for sharing, for learning, for getting involved in any kind of adaptive sport at any level.

Marty Anderson: We’re a growing organization and it is on the website everywhere there’s a sport that we’re looking for sport ambassadors. We’re looking for those single individuals that have all the knowledge about the sport, just like I do about wheelchair tennis, about wheelchair basketball, about fencing, about rugby, about equestrian, about any of the sports. If you are an efficient person and know all the details, sign up as a sport ambassador on adaptive athletics. And I’ll grant you the tools to get in there and add all the nitty gritty details and add all the events and add all the things that you need to share that information with the community so that we can bridge the gaps. And that’s what we do still with Adaptive Athletics, is we also offer our weekly wheelchair tennis clinics out of the Gold River. And we honor our roots in trying to promote wheelchair tennis as well. And so I’m now a member of the USTA nor Cal’s Wheelchair Committee, an adaptive committee, and I talk about all the things that are going on in our section and also hear about what’s happening at the national level in regards to tennis.

And so I’m continually trying to push the envelope of completing this lifelong dream of helping tear down the walls to getting into adaptive sports, getting into the wheelchairsports, getting into sports in general, for all of those people living with disabilities that want to still continue to live healthy lives.

Alycia Anderson: I wanna say Marty, I’m so proud of this amazing legacy and life of adaptive sports and community based empowerment that you have created through the love of wheelchair tennis and our community. And I’m really proud of the impact. It’s extensive. Like we could have a five hour podcast for you to talk about all of these amazing achievements.

And what we’re gonna do is make sure that adaptive athletics. All of the links are in the show notes. So anybody that is out there that wants to play, that has an organization that wants to get involved in the network and or is an ally that wants to share this organization out to their network, we would really appreciate it and that would be really important.

Marty Anderson: I’d like to add that this is a global opportunity. It’s not just for the United States. This is a global resource for anyone to pipe into and to add their information. And I would just like to also close with one other thing is that I’ve done a lot in pushing this forward, right? But it’s only because of all the other people in my life that have been there that have showed me the way that have been a part of movement. I encourage everyone in professional wheelchair and adaptive sports nowadays. not forget roots. Don’t lose ourselves in the professionalism and the fight for the money and the careers and the coaches and all these things, but to remember that we started these sports out of a necessity and a care for each other, and I always wanna sew that in there.

Alycia Anderson: So what is your pushing forward moment to wrap up this amazing episode?

Marty Anderson: I’ll use adaptive athletics tagline. You are never out of the game

Alycia Anderson: Beautiful.

Marty Anderson: No matter what’s going on in your life, no matter what’s happened to you, no matter all the circumstances. If there’s a will, there’s a way. So get out there, do the things you love in this life. Enjoy the sunshine and keep on keeping on.

Alycia Anderson: Thank you so much for beautiful episode and all the work that you’re doing for our community, Marty. It’s quite impressive and I’m so happy that we got to share your amazing story.

Marty Anderson: Thank you for giving me the opportunity and

This has been pushing forward with Marty and Alycia, and that is how we roll.

Alycia Anderson: I will see you next time.

Marty Anderson: See you next time.