The Nebraska Red Dawgs are a wheelchair youth basketball team that competes and grows together. Among the players are sophomore Caiden Hansen and junior Quinn Hoover, who play key roles on the team.
This marked Hansen’s 10th season playing, while this is the fifth season for Hoover. Hansen started playing intramural softball at age 4, when someone pointed out and recommended basketball to him.
“So from there, I just kind of tried it out – and ever since I’ve been hooked to it,” Hansen said. “Thats kind of where it all started.”
Hoover was around 7 years old when he first got exposed to wheelchair basketball. He didn’t join initially, however he was offered multiple times. He refused because his attention was elsewhere at the time.
“Finally, the head coach of the Nebraska Red Dawgs, Patrick Christiansen, reached out to my mother, and directly asked her to bring me to practice,” Hoover said, “I went literally expecting I’m going to go to this one practice to make my mom happy and then be done, and ended up staying there.”
The word family comes to mind for Hansen when explaining the Red Dawgs. “I mean, the brotherhoods and friendships that you make have been amazing, and you get to play a familiar sport with people who are just like you,” Hansen said. “It’s just really awesome to get to play and share your love for a sport with everyone else.”
Looking back on the years he has spent with the Red Dawgs, Hoover expressed: “We’ve had players leave, we’ve had players graduate, tournaments where we didn’t win any games, but at the end of the day, we all came together as a team.”
“I wonder where I’d be right now if I’d never joined the Red Dawgs in the first place and how different my life would be,” Hoover said.
Practices for the Red Dawgs typically are held every Saturday for three hours during the season, which typically runs October through April. They split up practices into three portions: an hour of conditioning, a drill section, and finish off with an hour of scrimmaging.
“We’ve got people coming from all over the place,” Hansen noted. “So having that once a week just makes it a lot easier for everyone.”
For Hoover there was one particular moment when he knew he belonged on the Red Dawgs. “We were playing against the best prep team in the nation in Kansas City,” Hoover said, “I went out there in this game and I was running on maybe six weeks of experience.”
Hoover ended up scoring 14 points out of the team’s 22. He mentioned how he felt proud of himself because he didn’t have any experience playing and not even much experience in a wheelchair because he doesn’t use one on a daily basis.
The Red Dawgs travel a good amount during their season. Nationals are hosted by the NWBA, this year located in Louisiana. They travel farther than all of their other tournaments during their season to nationals.
“We travel all over the Midwest, our most common locations are Missouri and Kansas City,” Hoover said.
Practices for the Red Dawgs start in September and they have their very first tournament in November. They end around late March to early April for nationals. Tournaments can be once a month or multiple in one month, playing a total of five to seven tournaments all season.
There are opportunities to play wheelchair basketball after high school. “I’m considering going to college and playing, I know some people are able to play professionally in countries like Spain and Germany,” Hansen said. “You have Team USA, the Paralympics, and then we are working on getting an adult program up and running here in Nebraska.”
