Jacobs alum inducted into wheelchair basketball hall of fame

Born with a muscle-fiber disease that limited his ability to walk, Kevin Orr had to crawl onto the wrestling mat at Jacobs High School to take on able-bodied opponents.

"He had unbelievable upper body strength," said Eliseo Saldivar, Orr's wrestling coach. "Kids would get frustrated with him. They could not turn him over. He had a determination and just a drive. He never let anything stand in his way."

That would include crutches, leg braces and, ultimately, a wheelchair.

But it was the wheelchair that led Orr to new athletic heights. The 47-year-old, 1986 graduate of the Algonquin school is training the Canadian rugby team, ranked No. 1 in the world, for the Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this September.

At University of Illinois, a pioneer in wheelchair sports since the late 1940s, Orr won four intercollegiate national championships with the wheelchair basketball team and was named Intercollegiate Player of the Year in his senior year.

Now living in Pelham, Alabama, he is among the first inductees of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association Intercollegiate Hall of Fame.

"It was really a no-brainer," Orr said. "Before then, I was thinking I'm going to be a chemical engineer. A whole new world opened up. ... 32 years later, I'm still at it."

No limitations

Orr didn't let his disability hold him back, said childhood friend Kristin Corriveau, Community Unit District 300's assistant superintendent for elementary schools.

"If we were skateboarding, he was skateboarding. If we were climbing trees, he was climbing trees. There were never any limitations in his world," she said.

Since childhood, Orr had a competitive spirit and a willingness to try everything, said his identical twin brother, David Orr of West Chicago.

"The first race I remember him running was Founders Day in Algonquin, and he did the one-mile race on crutches," David said. "He's always been determined, and I think part of it is because we didn't treat him differently."

Kevin Orr went on to win two bronze medals in wheelchair racing at the 1988 Seoul Paralympic Games in Seoul, South Korea, in the 800-meter and 5,000-meter races.

Then a coach

Orr also started a quadriplegic rugby team at the University of Illinois. After graduating there in 1990 with a degree in therapeutic recreation, he moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where he started a wheelchair rugby program at Lakeshore Foundation, which provides sports rehabilitation for people with disabilities.

"Our team won five consecutive national championships," he said. "That's really how I developed as a wheelchair rugby coach."

Orr later became head coach for the U.S. wheelchair rugby team. He was featured in the 2005 documentary "Murderball," about quadriplegics who played full-contact rugby in wheelchairs and overcame unimaginable obstacles to compete in the 2004 Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece. The film was nominated for an Academy Award.

Orr is now in Rio with the Canadian wheelchair rugby team for a Paralympic test event.

"Showcasing abilities of people with disabilities in a high-performance environment," he says, "is pretty awesome."