CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A Charlotte teenager is set to have surgery this summer to help her mobility, balance, back and other issues related to her paralyzed leg.

With the support of her local basketball league, the 17-year-old says she is looking forward to a bright future, as long as it includes more basketball.

What You Need To Know

  •  Adaptive sports program has grown to 75 athletes of all ages, creating several teams

  •  The program, which started in early 2000s, gives kids and adults access to adaptive sports

  •  Children, adults and their families also gain a support system as surgeries and other health care needs continue, co-founder says

One night a week in a Charlotte church activity center, Sadie Absher gets her competition fix.

“Definitely has opened a lot of doors for just opportunities and to be able to go to tournaments, just like my friends do, school friends and siblings,” Absher says while taking a break from practice. 

Absher is one of 75 athletes competing with the Charlotte Rollin’ Hornets, a wheelchair basketball league with participants from up and down the East Coast.

“The mission of the Rollin’ Hornets is to promote independence for both children and adults with physical disabilities and provide opportunities to pursue active, healthy lifestyles in adaptive sports,” the organization states on its website.

For Absher it’s been a smashing success. 

“When I was like three and a half, my spinal cord was attacked with like a virus, that was with transverse myelitis, that’s basically what it’s called. It paralyzed me from the waist down,” Absher recalled. 

Eventually, the feeling in her left leg came back, but her right remained paralyzed. Since then, she’s used walkers, braces and now for the last decade, a wheelchair to play basketball. 

“Just the community of it and to be able to have people that understand you and get you around you,” Absher said about why she likes participating.

The program helps dozens of athletes grow in the game, and in their lives, as they undergo surgeries and other treatments, which are often serious and require months, if not years, of care. This summer, Absher will have a second limb-lengthening surgery.

“I did the surgery when I was in about third grade, so that definitely helped me a lot with just my confidence, being as tall as other kids, and you know, being able to walk and have that be even with my left. And, you know, now having surgery again I hope it can do the same,” Absher said.

This time, she’ll have the strength and support of her teammates to assist on and off the court.

“Basketball is what brings us together, but it’s all the other really cool things and extended family that they build, which changes their lives,” added Mike Godsey, one of the organization's co-founders and an active coach.

“She came from a super athletic and super supportive family, and it’s really been cool to watch her grow as a player, as an athlete, as a student,” Godsey said about Absher.

Godsey says he and two other parents started the program in the early 2000s for their kids, who needed access to adaptive sports. Now, Godsey says Absher and her teammates learn independence, how to advocate for themselves, and along with their families, gain a support system.

About a dozen athletes a season have some sort of surgery, according to Godsey.

Dr. Brian Scannell, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon with OrthoCarolina, says technology has advanced drastically in the last decade, including leg-lengthening implants and strategies, like the one Absher is likely to experience this summer.

“We can place inside the bone, and lengthen externally. So we lengthen it, and it’s lengthened through a magnetic process. We use that for lengthening of the tibia or the femur. I also use a very similar technology for some of my really young patients with scoliosis as well. And that’s really changed the game for a lot of us,” Scannell explained.

Scannell says the new technology has helped patient care and should improve long-term recoveries as it becomes more common.