Women’s chair basketball will go professional in England in 2022

Chair basketball duel at the last Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro. / AFP

Great Britain is one of the major world powers of this adapted sport, whose top divisions in Spain are mixed

Laura Gonzalez

While in Spain we wait for next season to start seeing how the top national women’s soccer division turns professional, which has been a reality in England for several years, in England the women’s league will take on the same status.chair basketball. This will be
the first world championship in this sport and category to take that step, and the first to be adapted both across England and in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

It will start in January 2022 and will last until May, with franchises based at four universities: Cardiff Metropolitan University, Loughborough University, University of East London and University of Worcester.
The league, as they have pointed out, will consist of 60% English players, and the rest from other countriesThey hope to promote the growth of chair basketball among local women, but at the same time try to attract the best in the world.

“Being the first group of women to pave this way, I never thought it would happen,” England international Siobhán Fitzpatrick said in ‘The Guardian’ newspaper. “It gives me goosebumps just talking about it,” she adds, highlighting that it will help them gain visibility and be seen in a different way.
“We will no longer be disabled athletes, but athletes, and we will be talked about as such, and not as you see it every four years.”, alluding to the Paralympic Games, and the fact that their matches will be broadcast regularly on television.

Mixed league in Spain

Great Britain is actually one of the main forces in chair basketball. His men’s team won gold at the 2018 World Cup and Europe a year later. In this same appointment, the women’s team hangs two silvers.
In Spain the highest national division, to be awarded by Bidaideak Bilbao BSR, and in which the Zuzenak Vitoria Vital Foundation also participates,
this is a mixed competition, as in many other countries, because there are great differences in practitioner level between men and women.

At the Paralympic Games in Tokyo, the women’s national team will be in attendance, having not done so since the ’92 Barcelona Olympics, when they play as the home team. This time they got it of their own accord, in the last game of the European Women’s League stage in 2019.

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