In prison, wheelchair basketball offers a chance at reinvention

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Before basketball practice begins, Larry Roach calls the men into a circle.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and they are gathering inside the gym at the California Medical Facility, a prison about 55 miles from San Francisco for men, including those with physical disabilities and other serious health needs.  

The men come in a mix, some rolling in in the wheelchairs they use every day, others walking in. They ease, one by one, into the low chairs with slanted wheels built for basketball. Roach waits until everyone, at least 15 players and five coaches, settles. He is incarcerated here, too, and able-bodied, but in this gym, he has another role: the “inside” coach.

The team always checks in before they play. The room takes on a focused energy, the faint rustling of bodies shifting in their seats and the soft scrape of wheels gliding across the room. Each man listens attentively as he awaits his turn to speak.

If you want to share news from back home, say how your week went, spit out a motivational line or two, or welcome new players, this is the time to do it. 

On this day in late September, Roach talks about effort: “You can’t teach it. You gotta want it.” Then the men, still in their circle, all turn their fists to the men on either side, linking the whole team. Joe Chambers, a two-time Paralympian and one of the “outside” coaches, recites their slogan: “Everything we do, we do together.”

With that, they disperse — and the gym erupts. Basketballs begin to bounce. A low rumble grows, as hands slap wheels to accelerate red, green, black and silver chairs. They collide. Men tip sideways, falling over, and right themselves in a single beat. Someone calls, “Outlet!” to signal he’s open for a pass after his teammate regains possession of the ball.  

Impulsivity works against you in wheelchair basketball. Someone on defense can block the path you wanted to take to the net and you can’t sidestep around him like you do in stand-up basketball. You have to stop, assess what’s in front of you and find another way. 

Roach has come to think about that lesson, finding another way, as bigger than basketball. “In wheelchair basketball … you got to slow your brain down and say, OK, I can’t do that no more,” he says. “So what’s the next best option?” 

It teaches you to find a way out, he says, especially if you grew up feeling like you didn’t have many choices.

The message is painted in black on the gym wall: “RE CREATION.”

The space is no accident. Jeremiah Holland, creator of the wheelchair basketball program and the facility’s recreation supervisor until about a month ago, believes recreation can be more than movement, that it can be re-creation, an opportunity to practice being a different person.  

It all starts with imagination, he says. Inside prison, where people are cut off from the outside world and expected to follow strict rules and play certain roles, “imagination contracts.”

“People are always larger than the role that was assigned to them,” he says. 

Sports can give people a chance to work on their character and build relationships in a “lonely, isolated” prison, Holland says. You learn something about yourself in how you react to frustration and losing a game — both teaching moments that push players to consider how they would handle similar situations outside of the gym. 

Over time, you learn to respond differently in your relationships with others and confront the painful parts of yourself, Holland says. This is why sports programs can change people for the better and “help people figure out how to look at the most difficult things in their life,” he says. 

California is leaning into the rehabilitative potential of sports. On Sept. 30, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Second Chance Sports Act, directing the state’s prison system to come up with a plan to expand sports programming. Those who participate in organized sports will reportedly be able to earn credits that can lead to early release. 

Holland has spent years weathering storms, like changes in prison leadership and a pandemic, to build recreation programs that embody this philosophy. Among them is this basketball team unlike most found in U.S. prisons, where able-bodied men and men with physical disabilities train for and play wheelchair basketball alongside one another.

He credits the community he built around the program as the reason it exists and has lasted. Holland brought in coaches and experts from the outside, gave incarcerated men, like Roach, increasing responsibility over the programs they joined, and fought hard to keep the prison administration invested. 

“Community engagement is really what allowed disability sport to happen,” he says.

Leaving behind gang life

When Roach was a boy decades ago in south Sacramento, he played sports with his friend Landon Jackson. Gangs eventually redrew the lines in their neighborhood, and with that, their relationship.

In their late teens, Roach remembers shooting at him.

Their paths did not cross again for many years, until one day, they saw each other coming down opposite sides of a hallway. Men who knew their history watched them, concerned. 

They pulled each other into a hug. “That was the first time I got to hug him in 23 years,” Jackson says. “It’s the dude I played with when we were in middle school and elementary school. Kids. Innocence…”

Roach had already begun trying to put that old life behind him. His change of heart had come during visitation one day, when his 5-year-old daughter asked when he was going to leave the gang alone. Bit by bit, he took action; he renewed his faith in God, stopped using his gang name, took a victims’ impact class and trained to counsel other men. 

It was this version of Roach who hugged Jackson and apologized. 

Jackson, by then, had also pulled himself out of the old life. He had become deeply embedded in the wheelchair basketball program, which launched publicly in late 2022. Able-bodied himself, he had joined because friends who used wheelchairs needed help, people to push them through the yard or to get them through a workout. 

“When you start getting in the wheelchair, you see what you can’t do no more,” he says. “It makes you honor people in a different way.” 

This kind of growth is what the coaches had in mind when they let able-bodied players join the program, says Mieko Chambers, the team’s head coach, and the head coach of the Los Angeles Clippers Chairmen, a National Wheelchair Basketball Association team. “All of a sudden, there’s this newfound respect for somebody that is looked to be weak or hurt.”

At some point, the gym stopped being just a gym to Jackson. The program put him in a space of serving others, he says, which made him visible to people who could see the change he’d gone through. Holland put Jackson’s name up for resentencing, and the warden wrote the judge a letter of support that played a role in Jackson’s release.

In 2024, Jackson walked out of California Medical Facility.

How he and other leaders ran things stuck with the team. “Prison tells you don’t address it if it’s not violence,” Jackson says. “This gym told you address it so it doesn’t get violent.” Which sometimes meant calling a guy out, face-to-face, when he crossed a line.

Once, Roach recalls, a player cursed at a volunteer. The men stopped practice, formed a circle and told him the behavior was unacceptable. They sent the player away for the day to cool off.  

“We don’t just want to single somebody out,” Roach says. “We’re gonna say what behaviors we won’t tolerate, and then go from there.” 

Other times it meant noticing when someone was struggling. At another practice, Steven Davis, an outgoing co-captain known as “Scooby Doo,” recalls walking in and sitting down. Normally, he would laugh, joke with others, get into his chair and get ready to play. The team noticed something was off and asked him what was on his mind. Davis had recently reconnected with his daughter, and he was afraid of losing her again.

The coaches hugged him. “We got you in here … We love you,” Joe Chambers told him. “We don’t want to see you like this.”

Davis still remembers it. “For them to hug me and tell me that they see the good in me and I’m a good person, it made me go harder in wheelchair basketball,” he says. “… It made me want to come in here and be around these guys who actually show that they care.”

‘I like just being physical’

Quentin Murphy moves through the traffic of chairs like a man playing chess, which is how Joe Chambers teaches the game: Think two and three moves ahead. Four years in the sport and over a decade in a wheelchair, Murphy is a co-captain alongside Davis, and considered one of the strongest players, the Michael Jordan of the team. 

Basketball had always been part of his life. But he was run over by a truck during the crime that landed him in prison, he says, and had his leg amputated while in custody. The following years were dark. “There was those times where I had suicidal thoughts,” Murphy says. 

The recreation options available to a man in a wheelchair were bingo, shuffleboard, resistance bands, chair yoga. “Those kinds of sports to someone like me is some boring stuff,” he says. “I’m really competitive and I like just being physical.” Disabled men who wanted competition didn’t have much to do, he says. 

Murphy had to learn basketball again in a different version of his body. Even though the instincts were similar, the mechanics were not. You have to generate speed using your arms, and make turns while protecting your momentum. You need to coast into your shots to get the ball up to a rim that is still 10 feet high. 

Now Murphy is one of the players others watch. His sisters, daughters and family friends know what he’s up to now and are proud of him, he says. When he comes into the gym, he doesn’t think about anything else. “It’s just a place of peace,” he says. 

Wheelchair basketball also gave him a new way to mull over his future. A decades-long sentence has made a future difficult for him to imagine. But he considers all of the programs he’s done while in prison, and looks to a player who left the gym and played professionally on the outside as a testament to what’s possible for him.

‘Living proof’

That player is Lavonte McDowell, whom the coaches consider the team’s success story. 

In many ways, McDowell’s story unfolded the same way as Murphy’s. He was shot in the commission of his crime, became a paraplegic, went straight from the hospital room to a jail cell, and learned everything about his disability on his own.  

He joined the team as it was finding its footing. It wasn’t too long before coaches were telling him men were starting to look at him as a leader, but McDowell didn’t see it right away. He just knew that he wanted to change and couldn’t do it alone. 

“I felt like I needed people to hold me accountable for my own actions because I couldn’t help myself or hold myself accountable,” he says. 

His name was the first thing to go. Around the prison, men knew him by a street name from his gang days: “Everybody in the prison knew me by Chaos,” he says. About two months after joining the team, he stopped answering to it. “This is a false belief. This is not even my name,” he says. From then on, he told people his name was Lavonte.

Fast-forward to the fall of 2024: McDowell and Joe Chambers remember the team gathered in a circle. Joe Chambers, who was already playing for the Los Angeles Clippers Chairmen, had some news to share. The Chairmen wanted McDowell to come play for them. McDowell cried tears of joy. 

He was released early November 2024 and has since played for the team during the 2025-26 season, traveling to games in states he had never been to.

Today, he works with Project Rebound, an organization that helps connect formerly incarcerated people with higher education. “I just wanted to be of service,” he says. “I took from so many people. Did so much destruction in people’s lives, and in my own life and my family’s life… I was tired of being evil and stupid.”

As for the coaches, they never cut him loose. They stayed in touch, met his family, and when he needed a chair of his own, they found pieces of old chairs, built one and sent it to him. 

“It’s wonderful to have somebody to actually give you chances. That’s all individuals want in prison,” he says. “… I feel that this program can give people that. I’m living proof.” 

No guarantee coaches can get inside

Partway through last month’s practice, Holland appears near the door holding a stack of identification cards. “Here’s all the IDs,” he tells the players. “I’m putting them up on that door. If you go to chow, grab your ID and meet me at the door.” 

A player looks toward the door. “Hey, coach, what if they don’t want to let us back in?” he asks. 

“They’re gonna let you back in,” Holland responds.

It’s a harmless question about dinner, but it’s also a reminder of the controlled prison environment they’re in. Even for the volunteer coaches, getting through the gate is not always guaranteed. Some drive nearly an hour one way and have at times been turned away, because searches have taken over the gym, lockdowns have wiped out programming for the day or staffing decisions have canceled practice, the coaches say. 

The state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation says that it tries to minimize disruptions to programs, but staffing, training and emergencies have sometimes required temporary changes.

Through the uncertainty and the many hours of driving and labor, including fixing the chairs, the coaches still show up, even on days when they or the players can’t get into the gym. 

“I don’t want them to think we’ve given up on it,” Joe Chambers says. 

So far, the team has played only a handful of games against outside teams. Joe Chambers has brought friends in, for example, and a Berkeley-based organization that has taught adaptive sports for decades has also played against them, Holland says. 

The coaches are hopeful for a future where games with outside teams happen more consistently. In their biggest dream for the program, they imagine registering the team with the National Wheelchair Basketball Association, and bringing outside teams into the facility to play enough sanctioned games to ultimately build a record and earn a national ranking. 

If all of those pieces fall into place, there still is one more obstacle: The team can’t travel. So opponents would have to come to them and go through security, just like any other visitor at the facility. 

‘A part of my family now’

In mid-October, after spending more than two decades behind bars, Roach walked out of the prison, uncertain but excited about his future. His family threw a homecoming party for him, and all of the wheelchair basketball program’s coaches showed up. “They’re a part of my family now,” he says.

He’s also reconnected with Jackson and McDowell. Roach knew how much wheelchair basketball meant to him inside prison, but he’s appreciative of the support network it is giving him in the free world. “When you feel isolated and alone, and you get into a program like that where it’s love and it’s support,” he says, “like, yo, my circle expanded.” 

As he adjusts to his new life, he gets a chance to test the emotional regulation and character work he picked up through the program. Getting out and being around so many people so quickly, for example, has called for breathwork. “Breathe, it’s OK,” he tells himself. And having lived for so many years with so few choices in prison, the pressure to spend money on things you don’t need once you’re out is really high, Roach says. Even with small decisions, “not being impulsive” can benefit you, he says, instead of spending money and realizing later that you needed it for something more important. 

He’s approaching his future in the same way: Roach’s already been offered a job at a transitional home, he says, but he doesn’t want to rush into anything. He’s considering the options to make the best choice. 

But one thing he knows for sure is that he wants to stay connected to the wheelchair basketball team. “Whatever role they need me in,” he says. The process for getting approved to go back in, and how long that’ll take, is unclear to him.  

Maybe one day, Roach will be back at the gym, gathering the men into a circle again. But this time, he’ll be an “outside” coach. 

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