 Welcome to the sports playbook where we discuss solutions to issues that impact sports. I'm your host, Angela Hazelett. Today's guest is Rob Taylor, the head coach for Auburn University men's wheelchair basketball team and the U.S. men's national wheelchair basketball team. We are here to discuss wheelchair basketball, collegiate and national team competition. Let's get to it. Welcome, Rob. I'm doing great. Thank you very much for having me on today. Rob, you have a really interesting background, so I'd love for you to tell us what led to your current role as head coach of the Auburn University men's wheelchair basketball team and also the head coach of the U.S. men's national wheelchair basketball team. Those are two pretty important, prominent positions. So how did you get where you are today? Yeah, you got some time. It can be a long story. Yeah, great. You got time. Let's do it. So my journey in adaptive sports and wheelchair basketball has been about 20 years. Started out as, really got into adaptive sports because of my uncle, Jim Taylor, who played wheelchair basketball in the Chicagoland area. He coached a women's team in the Chicagoland area as well. And as a young kid, I would go to his practices and kind of help out and jump in a chair and shag balls and rebound and help out wherever I could. Then went to school at the University of Illinois and introduced myself to the head coach of the team there and got involved with that program there and slowly worked my way up from towel boy and water boy to assistant coach of both the men and the women's team that they had on campus there. Following graduation, this is where it kind of diverges in the two different paths. One that leads to the U.S. team and one that leads to Auburn. So I'll go the Auburn path first. After graduating from the University of Illinois, moved out to Arizona and started working with the women's team, women's wheelchair basketball team, the Phoenix Mercury, coached them for a couple of years. My wife and I had started a family out there and we wanted to move back to Chicago. So we moved back to Chicago and I started coaching a junior's team or a high school team in the Chicagoland area, the Windy City Warriors. And then after coaching that team for a few years, the Auburn opportunity opened up and I was able to land the job here at Auburn and this is where kind of the U.S. team plays into that. So while I was at the University of Illinois, I helped out with the U.S. women's Paralympic team and was kind of the stat boy for them and helped out and did a number of different tasks that were needed to help the team prepare for. At that time it was the Games and Athens in 2004. After the Athens game, an assistant coaching position became available. So I applied and was named assistant coach of the U.S. women in 2005 and served that role through the Beijing Games in 2008 and was proud to be part of that team that won a gold medal with the women in Beijing. So in those games, there was a point where I took some time off away from the U.S. program and then came back as an assistant coach with the men and have been with the men since 2013, served an assistant coach role from 13 through the Tokyo Games and again very proud of the fact that we won a gold medal in Rio with the men in 2016 and then followed that up with another gold in Tokyo last year in the postpone 2020 games and it was through my involvement with the U.S. team that Auburn found out about me and actually it was a teammate of my uncles from college that had let Auburn know that I was an up-and-coming coach or a coach that was interested in getting back into the college ranks and that's how those paths kind of converged again. So I've been here at Auburn now for we're in the middle of my seventh season and also along the way after this past year the head coach from the U.S. team decided to step down and I got promoted to the head coach of the U.S. team so right now it's balancing two different teams which fortunately happened in two different parts of the year although with COVID it has kind of put a wrench in the U.S. team in terms of when we qualify and when we play so there's a little bit of overlap right now but it's been a long journey taking me a number of different places taking me all around the world and I'm excited to be here at Auburn and excited to lead the national team as well. Great it sounds like a lot of timing and opportunity that all stems from your involvement with your uncle and the start that you got in the sport so no longer in Chicago but no longer in Chicago but in Auburn. Let's talk a little bit about your role so the U.S. men's national team position led to your opportunity at Auburn University you've been there since 2016 you are the first coach in the program's history so what is that like starting a program growing a program talk to me about some of the challenges and opportunities that that creates creates being at the beginning of the building of the program. Yeah so I mean our program started a few years before I got here and we regularly started as a wheelchair tennis team we had one student athlete on campus it's easy to have a tennis team with one student athlete it's hard to have a basketball team which is one student athlete and it kind of grew from there where we're able to add additional people into our program so prior to my arrival it was grad students that were running the team and the grad student did a great job of helping to kind of get us started but I was tasked coming in with not just growing the wheelchair basketball team but growing our adapted sports in general so really the biggest challenges or some of the biggest challenges that we have with starting a program or even starting a new program is educating people about adapted sports it's a little different than the name than the able-bodied running game that people are used to so it's the education piece and and helping people understand that our student athletes are just as competitive as our able-bodied counterparts and then it's working on the exposure as well to make sure that more people across campus know about our athletes or student athletes about our sport and partnering with them to help us grow and push the outreach part of our program and really getting the powers that be to come out to a tournament to check us out whether that is advisors, provost, presidents, people of power within the university that can help us with that change are the ones that we'd love to get out to the game and we've been fortunate to have some great support from our university and we've had some great support from our athletic department I know my counterpart on the men's team Bruce Pearl has come out and supported our team so for us that's that was our challenge at the beginning and it's still a challenge today I would love to be able to sell out the Beardies Memorial Coliseum and by sell out I mean our games are free so anyone can come to our game for free you know our facility sits about 12 to 13,000 seats you know if we can get 500 people at a game that's huge for us but that's where the outreach and the exposure piece really helps with that and and the more we can get the students here at Auburn to buy into it the more we can get the families in the Auburn area to come out to the games the better it'll be for our student athletes to play in front of a large fan base but also helps with exposure to our sport because who knows you may have someone in your family or you may know someone whose neighbor has a kid with a disability but this is a great avenue for them to get started in their adapted sports you've talked about a lot of great details and maybe opportunities to get some key individuals in to promote the sport as well as growing the fan base a little bit further I would imagine being a Paralympic sports that's probably helped provide some kind of education into the competitive nature of wheelchair basketball but you you emphasize that maybe it's still a little bit of a challenge so what steps are you taking to help with that education to make sure that Auburn community at large understands that this is a great sport to watch yeah I I think it helps that aside from my position here that I also coached the national team and we we can use that to help push and promote our team but more important to add is we currently have five athletes student athletes within our program that are also part of the US national team pool of athletes we had three or four of them that were part of the under 23 national team that just competed this past year at their zone qualifier they want a gold medal at world championships they fell short of meddling and then we do have one of our athletes that was with the US senior team this past year down in Brazil where we want a gold medal down there and I think it's important to have those athletes help with the education piece as well across campus students get things done students are the ones that are seen more so than other than the coaches and the faculty so having five student athletes have success on a national team level and be part of the national team pool really helps when it goes to talking to different people across campus it's one thing to talk about my history with the national team the success that I've had with the national team but it means so much more one is your student athletes that have a gold medal where you know hanging around their neck and they can speak to their experience and we can show back to the Auburn family how much it means for the Auburn students to have that experience on the national level let's talk about the opportunities and challenges that arise from you straddling coaching positions with Auburn and the national team all right what do you mean challenges it's easy to keep all the mission calls at the same time I mean you're coaching five of these athletes right and in both spaces so yeah so I mean really the the challenge has come down to is really time management and making sure that um what I have to be focused on Auburn and the Auburn team and preparing for tournaments that that's solely my focus but at the same time currently there's stuff going on with the national team as well that we're dealing with uh you know the budget for this next year and figuring out tryouts and training camps in this next year we have two major tournaments for the national team one of which will take place in november which is the middle of the Auburn season so how do we balance um tournaments for the Auburn team if I'm going to be out of the country I'm very fortunate that I've got a great staff that works with me and it can cover for me when I'm out of town but really it's trying to balance all those things at once never mind the fact that you try to balance being a husband a father of two young boys that are involved in their own sports so it's definitely a challenge there but that's where making sure that the schedule is locked in and there's enough time built in for family time and and everything else is important but it's I think it's one of those things where it's always a challenge and it's just about surrounding yourself with the right team both here at Auburn and on the national team and on the home front to make sure that all responsibilities are taken care of sounds like a little bit of time management as well and do any of your athletes get caught up in having a conflict with their schedule some of them that are performing on the national team and Auburn as well so that did happen this past year with some of our U23 guys that went over to Thailand that tournament was near the beginning of the school year so they missed you know two and a half to three weeks to go to Thailand to compete in that tournament great experience for them and their teachers here on campus were great about allowing them to to make up their work later I think only one of them had to take an exam while he was over in Thailand and he was able to do so but being away for that long and missing class for that long you know set them back a little bit in their classes where it took them a while to make up in those for those classes so and that's not just a concern here with with the guys at Auburn it was a concern for any of the U23 guys that participated in that team and quite honestly is something that's in the back of my mind as we prepare for you know we have world championships coming up in June luckily no no school there for any of the guys but November is the Parapan America Games down in Santiago Chile so that's definitely a concern when it comes to selecting that team and making sure that if we do select any current collegiate student athletes that they have clear communication with their advisors with their professors with their grad student or with their grad assistants to make sure that they are able to miss the amount of time that is going to be required to participate on a national team if not the other option for them is they may have to look at taking the semester off from school so that way it doesn't keep them from graduating or impact their classes too much yeah absolutely and i mean that the time piece is challenging for any student athlete that traveling and the time away from from the classroom now collegiate sport is typically provided on a college campus through the athletics or recreation department wheelchair basketball at Auburn is a little different they're under the office of accessibility so what are the advantages and challenges with competitive wheelchair basketball kind of operating outside of athletics and recreation departments on a college campus yeah i think it's one of those things that if you talk to all the different coaches within the collegiate division for wheelchair basketball we're all kind of housed uniquely within our university in terms of whatever fits best some are within rec sports some fall within club sports others fall within their athletic department some smaller d3 schools fall within their athletic department we're probably one of the few schools where we're kind of away from sports all together we're part of the office of accessibility so we roll up to the provost office it we we have a great relationship with the athletic department and maybe someday we'll be part of Auburn athletics but where we're housed right now works really well for our program in terms of the office of accessibility is there to support any student on campus that has any sort of disability or needs any sort of accommodations and that's every single one of our student athletes so anything that happens across campus that they need assistance with that gets taken care of within the office of accessibility and they know all about our student athletes you know the the other great part is that within the office of accessibility the office of the provost it does give us exposure to the provost to the assistant provost to people that sit up in sanford hall the president so it allows us to have I guess closer exposure to those individuals than we would if we were housed in a different area and we get great support from the office of accessibility it's that's where adapted sports was born here at Auburn we're very proud of the fact that we're housed within the office of accessibility our director and assistant director are very supportive of us and I think it would be a hard day for them if we had to move on and moved into the athletic department but I think they also realize that as we continue to grow that that's probably the right place for us to grow into but for now we love where we're housed and the support that we get I would love to hear a little bit of a comparison of the the resources that are available to you under Auburn's model and under the national team model so let's talk about facilities financing staff support talk to me kind of compare and contrast obviously I'm not sure there are comparable but you know what what are you what do you experience between these two different programs sure I'll do my best to try to hit on each one that you talked about but I may forget something so so jump on me if I missed something from a facility standpoint here at Auburn I love the facility that we have we're housed within the Beardies Memorial Coliseum which is the basketball arena that Charles Barkley played in when he was here at Auburn the men and women's team moved up to the Neville arena about 10 years ago 12 years ago I guess and that's when we slid into the facility here so we've got a massive I mean when you hear the word Coliseum it's not a small building it's it's a massive building and and within the walls here but we've got a locker room for the team we've got our own strength and conditioning facilities here in the team and our athletic training office here is in the building as well so for our guys the Coliseum is is a one-stop shop for everything that comes or that has to deal with the basketball standpoint with the national team somewhat the same a little bit different we try to do most of our training out in Colorado Springs at the Olympic and Paralympic Training Center out there and once you get on site there everything is taken care of you've got basketball courts you know top of the line fitness equipment in the Ted Stevens building you know there's housing there there's dining option there some of the best food in the world you can eat is in the dining facilities there so you I mean you're treated like an Olympic and Paralympic athlete when you're out there in Colorado Springs we've also gone out to Lake Placid and trained at the training center out there and then there's a training center up the road in Birmingham Alabama Lakeshore Foundation that will do training camps there as well so from the facility standpoint uh court weight room athletic training it's not quite what we have here at Auburn is not quite national team level but it's not that far off either uh and our student athletes you know they're their residents here they've got their own dorm or apartments here the food can be top notch if they want it to be or it can be a bag of ramen it's whatever they decide to uh to make that day so it's really up to them so the Coliseum that you play in at Auburn is a bit of an older facility I think it was built in 1969 I believe and uh talk to me about accessibility challenges in that space I mean you're a team that needs accessible spaces has it been modified and updated to accommodate the needs of your athletes and your spectators yeah this that's the great thing about being housed within the office of accessibility and where we're at if there's anything that's not accessible either here in the building or any classroom that our students go to the office of accessibility works to make sure that that things are accessible for our student athletes so yes the building here is accessible the court is accessible on the outside we've got ramps that you know spectators or even our student athletes can push up to the top if they want to sit up top and every now and then we do conditioning out there on those ramps but yeah everything here in the facility is accessible uh to them our weight room is accessible the locker room is accessible so yeah we've we've made the accommodations here on campus to make sure that what our student athletes need they have and they feel as as they should be as true student athletes here on campus not student athletes with a disability so compare to uh compare for us that the funding model and opportunities between the two programs yes this is where it kind of diverges just a little more you know with the with the national team most of our funding just about all of our funding comes from the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee they fund our program for the year that funding goes to most of our funding their covers travel that's where the bulk of our expenses are from a national team and when we get to Auburn we'll talk about that too but it's not cheap to fly everybody in for our training camps it's not cheap to fly to Dubai for a tournament or down to Chile for a tournament later this year so that's where the the bulk of our expenses go and it's quite honestly the same way here at Auburn you know our funding comes from the Office of Accessibility we also do different fundraisers throughout the year we try to find different sponsors to help offset some of the expenses but we're in the same boat we don't we don't fly to our tournaments here at Auburn we bus everywhere we go so we've got some close bus rides you know three hours to Tuscaloosa our next closest is about eight hours up to Champaign Illinois and then we get to our some of our longer bus rides which are about 15 hours long but that's where the bulk of our expenses come is traveling to tournaments you had your bus expense your hotel expense your food expense and then we've got other odds and ends here equipment expense in terms of getting spare parts for the guys so yeah the budgets are a little different a little bigger from a national team standpoint but we've got the opportunity here at Auburn to raise additional funds through fundraising through sponsors to try to I guess close the gap between us and the national team but you know I think the national team is always seen in in a brighter light with it being the national program different funding but different funding models the travel piece is really interesting because you have athletes that need their competitive wheelchairs and then you have some athletes who have a personal wheelchair as well talk to me logistics how do you get athletes and all their equipment that they need to the different competitions that they're traveling to yeah so with uh with the team here at Auburn if you play Tetris growing up we do a lot of touches when it comes to loading the bus you know we've got those giant bays under the bus where we've got a store not just their competition chairs but also their their everyday chairs plus luggage plus any other equipment that we need to bring with so I've got a great support staff that has mastered the skill of turning chairs or taking wheels off so our chairs our competition chairs don't break down in a nice small little boxes they stay the same rigid size so what we can do is we can take the wheels off but that's about as much as you can take off the chair so a lot of trial and error at the beginning but we figured out how to make that work now from a national team standpoint that's where it gets a little tricky our team leader does a great job of communicating with our airlines before we fly to training camps or tournaments mostly tournaments when we have to notify them that hey the national team is traveling on this flight we're going to have you know we'll have a total of 17 or 18 people we're going to have a total of 24 to 25 wheelchairs depending on how many extra competition chairs some of our guys bring and that early communication with the airlines really helps out because there's been times where they've had to bring bigger planes with bigger cargo areas to hold all of our chairs but if we're just trying to get together for a training camp two or three guys can be on the same flight and there shouldn't be an issue from a transportation of chair standpoint so Auburn does that impact where you travel to competitions so you can take a bus rather than an airplane it's something that is a little closer in proximity or is your opportunity to travel for competitions unrestricted so our opportunity is unrestricted however for the ease of the team we try to stay within probably no more than a 14 or 15 hour bus ride it's not that we're opposed to to flying we just don't have a regional airport here in Auburn so we would be having to take a bus to Atlanta fly from Atlanta to wherever that competition is get rental vehicles or another bus so the logistics of it is just a little more of a challenge where it's just easier if we can jump on a bus fall asleep and wake up in Columbia, Missouri you know 12 hours later if you get on a bus absolutely having no local airport that kind of makes things a little more challenging for sure so 14 15 hours that's a long that's a long bus ride and the recruiting of athletes talk to me about recruiting so I know some teams recruit international students others are recruiting the Paralympic athletes what's your philosophy when it comes to recruiting for for Auburn? Sure so as a national team coach I want to be able to recruit and develop young U.S. talent high schoolers that are here in the U.S. I'd love to bring them down to Auburn and teach them what it takes to play on the national team and play at that level so for me I'll go out to different junior tournaments throughout the country usually stick around here to the southeast but I'll go to the national tournaments and and meet different athletes that way every summer we host a summer camp here on campus which is a great opportunity for any high school athlete to come to Auburn what I tell them is it's like a test drive in a car it's an opportunity for you to come down here for three to four days you're able to see if you and I vibe from a from a student athlete to coach perspective but it also gives you an opportunity to check out campus really inexpensively while you're playing basketball and you can see whether you see yourself fitting in here at Auburn whether Auburn is a place that you see somewhere where you can call home for the next four to five years so that's kind of one way that recruiting happens but also we have kids from across the country that reach out to us throughout the year expressing interest and want to know more information about Auburn or more information about our summer camps and that's how we begin to develop relationships with those kids as well are you able to provide scholarships for athletes to compete at Auburn we do have a pool of scholarship money we're definitely not swimming in money and offering out full-ride scholarships to anyone as of yet but that's always one of our goals is to get to that point so we're raising money for scholarships we do have some scholarships to offer out to student athletes but not nearly as much as they think or as much as they would like absolutely absolutely and I'd love to hear a little bit more about the COVID impact that you've had you mentioned delays in tournaments things being rescheduled but how did this impact both your team at Auburn and the national team yeah I mean that COVID year here at Auburn and here with our I guess our collegiate program was one that was kind of up and down all season again a lot of it fell back into where was that college program housed you know we're very fortunate that we had the support from Auburn to continue to play that year but there are other colleges that didn't compete that year so their athletes were on campus they were training but they didn't have the opportunity to play in games which I know was frustrating for many of them for our guys we were able to compete we we played through the rules of having to wear masks on the sideline and you know sit six feet apart and COVID test before every tournament so our guys were a trooper that year just going through all the protocols and I think we became a stronger team because of it we got an extra year to be able to compete even if we only competed against two teams the whole the whole year but but our guys enjoyed being able to play from a national team standpoint you know it pushed Tokyo back a year which threw a wrench into a lot of people's plans that were planning on retiring and the postponement of Tokyo then postponed you know our zone qualifier that was supposed to take place in 2021 got pushed back to early this year in 2022 a world change or sorry this past year 2022 our world championships was supposed to take place this past November that got impacted and shifted back another year so it really compounded everything and it really impacted a lot of guys on the team that wanted to retire some of them are thinking about retiring or not retiring and then all the different protocols we had to go through traveling to different countries and the COVID test and we had to do beforehand and do we need to get vaccinated should we get vaccinated is it required to be vaccinated go to Tokyo that played into a lot of guys' decisions in terms of what direction they wanted to go and then once we were in Tokyo it was COVID testing every single day and then as we got near the end of the tournament there was a COVID scare within the men's pool that forced our guys to go through some more stringent testing from a COVID standpoint so it was nice to win a gold medal and kind of put you know a nice finish to the tournament a nice finish to an extra year that really stretched on for the guys wow this persevering through all that adversity and those challenges that's amazing well Rob we really appreciate your time are there any final parting things that we should know about wheelchair basketball that you think is important for our viewers to understand but I think it's one of those things that if you know someone that has a disability wheelchair basketball may be their sport it may not be their sport but reach out to someone within the wheelchair basketball community and they'd be able to help guide you in the right direction whether it's a disability that happened at birth or something that you acquired later on in life I think everyone within the wheelchair basketball and the adaptive sports community is about making sure that opportunity is there for for anyone so if you're watching this and you have a disability and you're interested reach out to me or anyone in your area and we'll do anything we can to help you get involved in the sport of your choice but I want to thank you for having me on today and to share about Auburn wheelchair basketball and about the Paralympic team and about everything that's going on from an adaptive sports standpoint so thank you very much for that. Rob it's amazing I'm excited to see how your season will come out this year so good luck as you're heading into that with your student athletes and thank you for being here. Thank you and War Eagle. This was the sports playbook and we appreciate Rob's insight on the wheelchair basketball collegiate and national team competition so thank you to our viewers for joining us today we'll see you again in a couple weeks. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.