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When Richmond, Virginia, hosted the 2024 Wheelchair Basketball National Tournament in April, Richmond Region Tourism teamed up with local organizations with expertise in disability etiquette to make sure the athletes had an inclusive and welcoming experience throughout the destination.
In April, more than 1,100 athletes gathered at the Henrico Sports & Events Center, just outside of Richmond, Virginia, where, over two weekends, 100 teams competed in the 2024 Wheelchair Basketball National Tournament. The tournament, the largest adaptive sports series in the U.S., is hosted by the National Wheelchair Basketball Association (NWBA), the largest disabled sports organization in the world.
Along with the NWBA, the tournament was hosted by Sportable, a two-decades-old, Richmond-based adaptive sports nonprofit; the Richmond Region Tourism organization, which promotes Richmond, along with four counties in central Virginia; and the Henrico Sports & Entertainment Authority, responsible for developing the Henrico Sports & Events Center, which opened in the fall of 2023.
In July, NWBA CEO Brandon McBeain, with Forrest Lodge, director of strategic partnerships for Sportable, and Gerald Taylor, Richmond Region Tourism’s sports sales & events manager, joined a PCMA Event Leadership Institute webinar, “The How and Why of Accessible Events: Case Studies from the Field,” to talk about working together with the community to bring the tournament to Richmond and what they learned from the experience.
Laying the Foundation
Sportable, which provides competitive and recreational sports for individuals with disabilities, gets credit for laying a lot of the groundwork for accessible events in the city and surrounding area, Taylor said. “They’ve been doing different adaptable events for a long time and have been in the community, building relationships. From our perspective, we work with them to continue to push the needle forward.”
Gerald Taylor
Sportable and Richmond Region Tourism make a good team, Taylor said. Sportable organizes two wheelchair basketball teams that compete in the NWBA tournament every year and understands how it works inside and out, he said. That combination of Sportable’s “boots on the ground” experience and the DMO’s willingness to help create a better experience for attendees, meant that “you just put both of us together,” Taylor said, “and we come up with a solid event.”
One of the aspects where Sportable’s experience came into play was in recognizing the need to be very proactive in addressing the needs of participants who were traveling to the event by air. Before the event, “we got a lot of feedback,” Lodge said, from tournament participants about air travel with wheelchairs, an experience that is notoriously challenging and often results in mishandled or damaged wheelchairs. As soon as the bid for the tournament was awarded, Lodge and Taylor reached out to Richmond Region Tourism’s contacts at the Richmond International Airport, “to start the conversation about what they could expect for the event,” Lodge said.
Lodge also created a form that was sent to all of the participating teams asking for players’ travel itineraries, and the number and kinds of wheelchairs they would be bringing with them, as well as the kinds of personal assistance they may need. Lodge gave those details to both the airport and airlines staff well in advance of the event, so that they would have “all the information that they would need to try and execute a smooth transition and experience for these athletes traveling to our city,” Lodge said.
The Richmond International Airport staff “was all in from the jump, and were involved throughout the entire process,” Lodge said. However, participation from the airlines was minimal, he added, until the event drew closer, “and they started paying attention to the numbers.” Despite the planning by the event hosts, there still were major problems as teams arrived at the airport with missing or dismantled equipment, a situation that was widely reported in national news outlets. The “miscues” that resulted in equipment mishandling didn’t come from the Richmond Airport, Taylor told Convene, but from the airlines at connecting airports.
Transferring sport wheelchairs from the airport to the event venue went more smoothly. In his experience traveling with teams to the tournament, Lodge was familiar with the financial pain it caused teams “to pay to rent extra vehicles just to transport the chairs that sit in the gym for the entire time we’re there,” he said. So Lodge found a sponsor that provided vehicles to transport the wheelchairs from the airport to the event venue and then back again, in exchange for putting their logos on event T-shirts and the NWBA website. “I know it really made a huge difference for some of those teams,” Lodge said, and it was an “out-of-the-box” way “to support and provide a top-notch experience for the teams.”
The 2024 Wheelchair Basketball National Tournament’s 196 games were broadcast live on Sportable.org.
Culture Shift
Finding enough accessible hotel rooms for the athletes wasn’t a problem — the Richmond Tourism Region has a database that tracks the number of accessible hotel rooms across surrounding counties in addition to Richmond, Taylor said. For the NWBA event, not all of the rooms were in Richmond, but all were in proximity to the venue, which is three miles from Richmond.
The DMO also took extra steps to make sure that frontline and hospitality staff had access to training that would help them know how to interact with the visiting athletes in ways that would make them feel comfortable, Taylor said. Before the event, the DMO invited hotel staff to a panel presentation, which included the DMO, Sportable, VisitAble, a local disability education and etiquette training company, and 6 Wheels Consulting, a Richmond-based firm that specializes in disability and inclusion education. “We talked to the different hoteliers and said: ‘These are things that are going to happen. These are ways you can help. These are ways you shouldn’t help,’” Taylor said. The training not only gave the hotel staff the skills to provide a better experience, it created a lot of community engagement around accessibility, Taylor said.
The DMO also worked with John Morris, the founder of the Wheelchair Travel blog, who created a wheelchair-accessible guide to Richmond. The guide included reviews of the airport, hotels, attractions, as well as assessments of the accessibility of the city’s taxicabs and sidewalks. Morris gave the city’s public transportation system a glowing review, as he did the fried chicken and macaroni-and-cheese at the wheelchair-accessible Mama J’s Kitchen in Richmond’s Jackson Ward neighborhood. Morris’s guide gave participants a way to know where to go to find accessible entertainment and dining, Taylor said. “And it created a more community[-centered] environment for the event as a whole.”
The investments that the local hosts made into creating the event paid off — the NWBA announced in July that it would be bringing the 2025 Wheelchair Basketball National Tournament back to Richmond in April. But for Taylor, the effort wasn’t just about one event, even one that returned for a second year. “This was really about changing the entire culture of accessibility in the Richmond region,” he said. “This is really a culture shift.”
The Right Lens
When you’re planning accessible events, always look to the community you’re planning to serve to provide their feedback and experience, advised Sportable’s Forrest Lodge. As a non-disabled person, Lodge can do his best to use his experience working in the adaptive sports industry to do an accessibility audit of a facility, he said. But, he added, “I’m not going to have the same experience. It’s more effective to have the community that we’re serving in these events, that we’re trying to accommodate, to be a part of the process — whether it’s a physical structure or overall experience, expectations, wishes, or what they want to see at these events.”
Barbara Palmer is deputy editor of Convene. Ascent is supported by the PCMA Foundation.
ON THE WEB
Find information about accessible travel in Richmond and central Virginia at Visit Richmond and on John Morris’s Wheelchair Travel blog.