By Juan Ortiz | Host, Chicago Grit The squeak of tires. The clash of metal. The perfect swish  of a net. If you walked into the Broadway Armory last month, you didn’t just see a basketball tournament. You saw a movement. You saw thirteen youth teams from across the Midwest battling for every inch of the court. You saw parents cheering, coaches strategizing, and kids finding a version of themselves they didn’t know existed. This is the "Present" of Chicago Adaptive Sports (CAS

Introduction: More Than the Myth For decades,   Jorge Alfaro   has been the face on the posters for Chicago Adaptive Sports; the polished soundbite, the Hall of Fame legend. But the man is not a myth. Behind the public image is an unfiltered, unapologetic force of will, forged in a single moment that changed everything. His turning point came on his father’s birthday, July 2nd. He was ten years old. A group of kids, a discovered gun, and a moment of play ended in tragedy. A s

Chicago Park District – Adaptive Sport Program                                                Daniel Ferreira – Adaptive Sport Program & Event Facilitator Chicago Skyhawk Ixhelt Gonzalez is Once Again Selected to the United States Women’s Senior Wheelchair Basketball Team and the U25 Women’s Team: Our Chicago Skyhawks Wheelchair Basketball Program is excited to announce that Chicago’s very own Ixhelt Gonzalez has once again made the cut with the US Women’s Wheelchair Basketba

Fourteen years old. Lying on the cold Chicago pavement on a February night. My first thought wasn’t about dying. It was about the tingling sensation spreading through my body, starting at the tip of my nose and washing all the way down to my toes. It was the feeling you get when your foot falls asleep, but it was my entire world going numb. A bullet had just shattered my T12 vertebra. I tried to push myself up, to crawl, to keep moving, but only the top half of my body worked