Back to the Illinois Fighting Illini Newsfeed

World-class wheelchair basketball on way to State Farm Center

All his life, Gabe DenBraber was told to try wheelchair basketball. But as a seventh-grader, he wanted no part of it.

The spina bifida that afflicted him from birth, after all, hadn't stopped him from playing and succeeding at able-bodied baseball to that point. But after a surgery failed and his legs grew too weak to support his upper body, he begrudgingly decided to give it a try.

"As soon as I got in that gym, everything changed," DenBraber said.

"I was like a kid in a candy store. ... I went, 'Oh wow, this is not what I thought it was.