SPRINGDALE, Ark. — The Ozark Adaptive Sports Association (OZASA) is a nonprofit organization that brings wheelchair friendly sport competitions for differently-abled athletes. Founder Sean Kent says he does it for the health of people in his organization.
“When people have a spinal cord injury or an amputation, they end up just, they end up just staying at home, not doing anything. The sports themselves, getting people out lowers cases of depression, obesity, and all that stuff it gets, it just gets people out, get some happier and that's the most important part. To realize that your life's not done after the accident. My accident was 12 years ago, and I got in a rugby chair right away,” Kent said about what OZASA means to its members.
The reason Sean wanted to start this organization was to help people like him in Northwest Arkansas.
"That was the best thing I did. Support groups didn't do anything for me. It was just people complaining. So I did that in Chicago, (where Sean is from), then I moved here. And when I moved here, all that was available was wheelchair basketball, in Little Rock. So, you know, it's, it's the right time, the right area to build this kind of program," Kent said about why he founded the association.
Members of the community are thankful for the opportunity they've been given not only to play the sports they love but to meet new people.
“Folks feel seen, understood, valued. You know, I think for me, at least having a wheelchair basketball community really just kind of, in a lot of ways exposed me to the variety of people within the disability community that I wasn't privy to before. So I think it's it's important for us to constantly keep learning from each other for us to constantly keep being exposed to just the different variations of human experience.”
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