By Brittany Woodcock [1] and Sarah Cooke [2]
BELLEVILLE – Katherine Kerr-Pankow thanked both her “blood family” and her “basketball family” after accepting the Peace Medal Wednesday night at the Trenton YMCA.
Kerr-Pankow started Wheelchair Basketball Quinte [3] in 2013 when she returned home to Belleville after receiving a graduate degree in occupational therapy.
The program provides an opportunity for men and women of all abilities to come out and play basketball. You can find the group every Tuesday from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. for an introduction to the sport and then from 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. a full-court game takes place.
“I know when I said I wanted to do this it seemed a little farfetched,” said Katherine Kerr-Pankow, 31, program founder, after receiving the 2019 YMCA Peace Medal from Ron Riddell, regional general manager of the Y. Photo by Sarah Cooke, QNet News
In her acceptance speech, she spoke about the challenges of starting the program, including having to store the wheelchairs in her mom’s garage and her dad’s storage unit.
“It was a bit challenging, but then the YMCA, Amanda Smith actually, reached out to me back in 2014 and said, ‘Would you like to partner with the YMCA?’ and I of course said, ‘Absolutely.’ And our program has only grown ever since.”
“We’ve really become a family – I call them my b-ball fam’ – and I feel like just coming here and knowing you’re going to be part of a family just brings so much positivity to your life,” she said.
Kerr-Pankow noted that while it’s always good to get physical exercise, the social aspect is really a positive impact in many of the members’ lives – including her own.
For the athletes, it’s more than just a game of basketball.
Amputee Gus Sacrey, 50, has been coming to Wheelchair Basketball Quinte since the beginning and said that the best part is that the “disability disappears” and everyone is just a ball player.
“When you have a disability and you’re able to take the court, you’re no longer a person with a disability. You don’t worry about surgeries, you don’t worry about amputations, or pills, or meetings or appointments – you don’t worry about any of that crap. I’m a basketball player. I just happen to play sitting down,” he told QNet News.
Sacrey said that he used to be very athletic before he had his leg amputated over a decade ago.
The program was “life-changing,” he said, adding that Kerr-Pankow saved his life.
“Katherine absolutely saved me. And she allowed me to become an athlete again – and that’s not an exaggeration. She saved me. I was fighting depression and I was losing.”
Kerr-Pankow now works as a school-based occupational therapist for Quinte & District Rehabilitation Inc. [4] at seven schools in the region.
She is also the co-founder of Quinte Adapt [5] and a committee member for Belleville’s Field of Ability [6], an accessible and barrier-free baseball field that will open next summer.