Whoosh. Dribble. Shoot. That was the moment Team GB, who University of Stirling wheelchair basketball player Shayne Humphries was playing for, scored their eighth point against Team Spain, and nearly [but not quite] took home the FISU trophy.
Humphries, a 19-year-old sports scholar from Dundee, took home a silver medal alongside five other teammates last summer at the FISU World University Games in Rhine-Ruhr, Germany. Sporting defeats can feel crushing, but for Humphries, coming second was a win for the underdogs, who’d been voted least likely to win in fan polls and had knocked host-team Germany out of the contest, against a backdrop of roaring German fans.
“I’ve done friendly tournaments representing GB before, but this was my first time to win an actual medal for them. So for me individually, that [winning silver] was a really good moment. (…) We only lost by three points against them [Spain], so doing that as a squad felt amazing,” Humphries says.
“Our oldest player was 24, and I was the youngest. So obviously, the highest level we’d played at that point was the UK league. So going into it, we thought ‘We’ll do all we can’, but then we only lost by three points, which we were really happy with.”
Humphries is Stirling Uni’s only wheelchair basketball player, and took up the sport at age 11 after discovering it through a Dundee parasporting festival. Now playing at a senior level, Humphries has been poached by Nottingham University to play with them down south, as well as winning gold competing with them at the British University and Colleges Sports (BUCS) competition.
He’s also a crucial part of the game’s Scottish community, which comprises only a handful of wheelchair basketball clubs in cities across Scotland. At the moment, he’s playing for Lothian Phoenix, a team based in West Lothian near Edinburgh.
“In Scotland, the wheelchair basketball community isn’t too small – like, it’s not massive, but if you consider how spread out we are…” Humphries says. “Where I started was the Dundee Dragons, then there’s the Grampian Flyers, who are Aberdeen-based, and then there’s Inverness Lions. There’s been other clubs that have struggled with numbers and not been able to continue, but it’s nice to have a community where everyone can come together.”
According to statistics from British Wheelchair Basketball, there were 17,000 people in the UK playing wheelchair basketball in 2021, with potential to grow to 70,000.
Despite this, disabled people still face barriers in their daily lives to participating, or even watching, sports. A 2025 survey from disability charity Activity Alliance found that across the UK, only 51% of disabled people had the opportunity to be active, even though 80% agreed that they’d like to be more active.
Common barriers include inaccessible public transport and lack of options and access to para-sports near where they live, according to think tank Disability Policy Centre. Humphries tells me that Stirling University’s para-sporting facilities are “night and day” compared to back home in Dundee.
But the inclusion of para-sports like wheelchair basketball in major sporting events like the Commonwealth Games or the Olympics can be massively positive, not just for the number of disabled people participating in sports, but in changing attitudes and awareness of para-sports.
Wheelchair basketball made its Commonwealth debut at Birmingham 2022, alongside seven other para-sports, marking the game’s biggest year for disabled athletes yet, and despite a scaled-back para-sporting programme this year (para-road cycling and para-triathlon, for example, won’t be included), Humphries sees any visibility for disabled athletes as a win.
“People’s awareness of disability in sports has generally improved since Birmingham 2022. Obviously, the whole concept of how the sport functions in terms of its rules is something people still aren’t fully aware of, just because it’s not as popular as able-bodied sports like the NBA, but as a whole, awareness has improved,” he says.
We’re on the court now, and Humphries is showing me some of his basketball skills. He’s gliding across the floor, dribbling the basketball with a precision only someone who’s spent years as a fan and student of the game could have.
He makes it look easy, but that couldn’t be further from the truth – a lesson some of his mates have had to learn the hard way over the years.
“When I was younger, a few of my pals said to me that it ‘Seems really easy’ and they’d somehow hop in the chair and be like ‘Oh wait, nevermind.’ Folk don’t realise that you’re doing everything with your upper body and how brutal this sport can get,” says Humphries.
“Similar to able-bodied sports, there’s loads of levels to it. Some people want to come and have fun together, and then you have higher levels where it’s a highly competitive sport.”
Wheelchair basketball and running basketball’s rules aren’t too dissimilar, Shayne tells me, apart from the exclusion of the double dribble rule, which means that players are allowed to dribble, place the ball in their lap, and then continue dribbling.
“I’ve seen people assume that because people in wheelchair basketball have disabilities, they get an automatic pass into big sporting events, but realistically, you have to build up to it,” Shayne continues.
Humphries is building up to a big event of his own: the 2026 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow this summer. He’d be the University of Stirling’s first-ever wheelchair basketballer to reach the Games, an accolade he’s clearly hungry for.
All that stands in his way? A rigorous training programme and intense selection process alongside some of the UK’s top players from now until July.
“We have our Scotland Academy camps monthly, which is a way for coaches to see everyone. Then everyone they’re already looking at there, they’ll see elsewhere at other competitions. They’ll also put together different combinations of people at training camps and see who they want to take based off of that,” says Humphries.
He has just four months to prove that he’s got what it takes to fill one of four lucrative spots on Team Scotland (three main, one substitute) when they compete in their first game on July 24 at Glasgow’s SEC Centre.
Image Credit: Jeff Holmes, University of Stirling.