Paralyzed veterans learn life, work skills from competitive sports

Marine Corps veteran Kyle Hansel of Pacifica is making a belt for his mother, using lessons, skills, and a renewed faith in himself gained from competitive sports despite hands and many muscles that don’t work.

His mom Teresa loves turquoise, so he’ll paint the bottom layer of the belt that blue-green hue, to gleam through decorative gaps he will laboriously cut in the top layer.

The work, like many of the tasks in his life, requires “adaptive” techniques he has honed through wheelchair rugby, archery and other sports he competes in thanks to the local chapter of Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA).

Hansel, 33, made it back intact from his 2012 tour in the violent desert of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, but it was an outing five years later with his little brother to the Grand National Rodeo at the Cow Palace in Daly City that left him quadriplegic and put him in a wheelchair. Thrown off a mechanical bull, Hansel suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the chest down.

“For the year or two after my injury there was a big feeling of being alone,” Hansel says. “Being in a wheelchair, I was on an island. People at restaurants don’t talk to me. They talk to whoever is standing with me. I’m not seen.”

Coming back has not been easy. Growing up in Pacifica, Hansel lived an active youth, playing soccer, baseball and basketball in school, and ripping around the hills on mountain bikes with his friends. When he  became an adult in the Great Recession, he found jobs scarce, so he joined the Marines to learn to be a mechanic and became a diesel specialist. He left the Corps and entered a college gun-smithing program in North Carolina.

His hands, he says, were his life — until the fall from the bull. While he was trying to recover at his in-laws’ farm in North Carolina, his marriage fell apart. His mom and dad suggested he move home, and came and got him.

Two years ago, a recreational therapist at the Veterans Administration hospital in Palo Alto — which has a spinal-cord injury center — connected Hansel with the Bay Area and Western Chapter of the Paralyzed Veterans of America. Hansel’s world opened up.

“The rec therapist says, ‘We’re going to New York for the wheelchair games,’” he says. He chose to compete in soccer, power lifting, a slalom obstacle course and air-rifle shooting. Then the PVA sent him to Arizona for another National Veterans Wheelchair Games competition.

“I get off the elevator, this woman approaches me, says, ‘Are you quadriplegic?’  I said yes. She said, ‘We need you to play rugby.’ I said, ‘Sure — what’s rugby?’”

Hansel found himself surrounded by more than 500 people who were in fundamental ways just like him: “No matter where you look, there’s a wheelchair rolling around,” he says. “We are all very competitive. We are having the time of our life. That sort of spun my head around to know that all these sports and activities are available even though only my arms work.”

Hansel had found a community that brought him back into the camaraderie of his days in the military. And he has become a chapter board member in the PVA. Hansel, with help from his new comrades and the veterans group, has voted himself off lonely island.

“He used to be pretty shy,” said Kory Amaral, the chapter’s executive director. “When I first met him, he would hardly say two words.”