Self assessment wizard

How to use the Wizard

Everyone reading this page is different – height, weight, speed, skills, attitude, enthusiasm, commitment – all of these factors vary from person to person. So it is important that you approach a sport that suits your particular skills and abilities. Above all sport should be fun, some of you may go on to achieve great things in your sport, others might just like to get fitter or just mess about with your mates. Either way it’s useful to assess your abilities when you choose what sports to try out.

Those of us with disabilities also need to choose sports that fit with our particular abilities. For example those with Visual Impairment (VI) are eligible for many sports – but the degree of that VI affects the sports your can play. For example with Judo you can fight if you are totally blind or you can fight if you are partially sighted as well. However with Blind Football you can only compete (apart from the goalkeeper) if you are a B1 (a classification that mean you cannot recognise the form of hand in any direction or distance). The Football Association (FA) does however run a number of other disability football teams including, partially sighted, deaf/hearing impaired, Cerebral Palsy (CP), learning disability and teams for amputees.

This same principle applies for other kinds of disabilities, like CP, Spinal cord injuries and amputees. In order to help you though to a sport that suits your abilities Parasport have created a ‘wizard’ which asked you a series of questions about your disabilities and guides you to appropriate sports.

This is how it works:

• Use the buttons below that best describes your disability (e.g. visually impaired, amputee etc); 
• Once you have your list of sports click on the headings and learn more about the sport; 
• Then click on the ‘find a club’ or ‘organisations’ button on the left hand navigation – and we will guide you towards places you can try out those sports. 
• Finally do register for the Parasport newsletter – this will announce various ‘come and try’ sessions run by all sorts of organisations.

Warning!

To start with Parasport is featuring only Paralympic sports. This means a list of 20+ sports. This is not all disability sports – there are many, many more. In the example above we talked about Football in fact there are just 2 football teams recognised at Paralympic level – CP and Blind. The other 4 are not part of the Paralympic games – but are just as much fun. With time we hope to include more sports and also extend the Wizard to cover more disabilities. Just please bear with us for now!!!!

PS This is not intended to be a definitive guide to disability sport and there is no guarantee that you will be successful in the sports that you are lead to! But do have a go!