Auburn Wheelchair Basketball looking to continue momentum as Tiger Giving Day approaches

Coach Taylor named national team head coach, five players part of U.S. under-23 team

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Coach Robb Taylor knows he has a great thing going with Auburn Wheelchair Basketball, and he wants that momentum to continue through Tiger Giving Day on Feb. 23.

With the help of donations from the Auburn Family in recent years, Taylor has been able to establish and build the men’s program into one with national prominence, and he and his players want that progress to continue in 2022 and beyond.

“For us, Tiger Giving Day has truly been a blessing,” said Taylor, who led Auburn to a third-place finish in the collegiate ranks last year. “We’ve been a part of it now for five or six years, and it has really helped enhance all parts of our program. The most important thing isn’t the money necessarily, but the number of donors. We see year over year that the number of donors continues to grow for our program, and that is important to us because it helps with our exposure and allows more people to find out about adaptive sports and wheelchair basketball.”

Taylor’s team—which competes in the collegiate division of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association, or NWBA—is recruiting top talent and seeing results. Earlier this season at a tournament in Missouri, the Tigers defeated top-ranked University of Texas at Arlington, ending the Movin’ Mavs’ three-year unbeaten streak.

“We are benefitting for it on the court,” said Taylor, whose squad next competes at the Edinboro University of Pennsylvania Feb. 18-19. “We are bringing in better talent, and we are putting out a more competitive product. This year, we have beaten some teams that we’ve never beaten before in program history.”

The team’s success has been buoyed by support from the Auburn Family, but Taylor also gives a great deal of credit to the players’ commitment to excellence on the court and in the classroom.

“That is a testament to the support from the Auburn Family through Tiger Giving Day and also the work and the effort that the guys are putting in on the court,” Taylor said. “They see everyone talking about Auburn being ‘an everything school’ or ‘a basketball school,’ and we like to consider ourselves part of that everything school, too. Even though we aren’t part of the Athletic Department, we still hold ourselves to the same standard that the Athletic Department does.

“With Coach [Bruce] Pearl doing great things with his men’s team, we want to have similar success here.”

Making an impact nationally

Taylor and his players are prominent in the national wheelchair basketball scene. He is a three-time Paralympic Gold Medal-winning coach as an assistant with the men’s and women’s national teams, including a men’s gold at last year’s Paralympic Summer Games in Tokyo.

In December, Taylor was promoted to head coach of Team USA’s men’s squad, replacing legendary coach Ron Lykins, who retired after guiding teams to four gold medals.

“It is big shoes to fill,” said Taylor, who has been coaching wheelchair basketball for more than 20 years. “There is a big target on our back having recently won back-to-back [Paralympic] gold medals in Rio and Tokyo, so there are high expectations for our team and for our program. So, I’m excited to take that on.”

Taylor will need to help Team USA through a rebuilding process that is customary and cyclical for national teams, and he feels his experience building Auburn’s program will help him in that endeavor.

“I am excited for the challenge, and I see it being pretty similar to what we have at Auburn,” Taylor said. “I took over a program that was growing and developing and helped turn it into a competitive program. The U.S. is kind of in the same place, where we are going to be bringing in a lot of guys who don’t have a lot of international experience. We are going to have to get them that experience quick to make sure we can compete and compete right away to qualify for the Paris Games in 2024.

“Hopefully we can bring back the third in a row, the hat trick for the U.S. men, which would be the first time that one country had won three Paralympic basketball gold medals in a row.”

Several Auburn players have a chance to help Taylor do just that, with five Tigers part of the national under-23 team program. Auburn’s Sam Armas, Jake Eastwood, Evan Heller, Joe Rafter and Luke Robinson all have a chance to earn spots on the U.S. team that will look to defend its gold medal in Paris in 2024.

“A quarter of the U.S. team is made up of Auburn kids, and that’s really the first time we’ve been represented from an athlete standpoint on a national stage with these student athletes,” said Taylor, who began as an assistant coach with the U.S. Men’s Wheelchair Basketball National Team in 2013. “It speaks volumes to what they’ve been able to do here at Auburn and how they’ve been able to train and push themselves. We are by far the university that is most represented on the international U-23 team right now, and all five of them have been given invites to try out for the senior team.

“I love coaching the national team and winning gold medals with those guys, but one of my proudest moments as a coach was to find out that five of our guys made the under-23 team.”

Onward and upward

This year with Tiger Giving Day, Taylor and the team are looking to raise funds for an adaptive van to transport athletes to community outreach events and tournaments, and the basketball team also will share the vehicle with the Auburn wheelchair tennis team.

“Prior to COVID, we were out in the community and would do demos for different schools around town or go to Fort Benning and do events with the Wounded Warriors,” said Taylor, whose team earned a 3.52 cumulative grade point average during fall semester. “We’re looking for a 15-passenger van so we can load it up with the equipment that we need—the wheelchairs, the hoops or whatever we need to bring with us—so we can get back out into the community and can start giving back to a community that has supported us quite a bit.”

Taylor fully believes in his players and their potential for future greatness, both on and off the court. Their commitment to achievement as student-athletes inspires him and others who help run the team, and he contends they are the embodiment of the Auburn spirit that is not afraid.

“They don’t really see themselves any differently from anybody else,” Taylor said. “The great thing is that they just see themselves as student-athletes. They just want to be seen in the same light as other student athletes on campus, be given the respect for how much work they put in to perfect their craft and have the success they are having on the court. So, anything we can do to help them be seen in that same light is always our focus with this team.

“The great part about Auburn is that’s the way a lot of people do see them. That’s what being part of the Auburn Family is all about.”

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