Patty Cisneros Prevo remains Tenacious
Tell us about yourself
In the fall of 1996 , I was a freshman at Indiana University , when I was in a car accident and acquired a spinal cord injury .
Before that I had been an avid athlete . I ran cross-country and track , played volleyball and tennis and basketball . Making that connection back to sport was something my physical and occupational therapists homed in on during my rehabilitation after my spinal cord injury . I know it sounds cheesy , but I really mean it that when I was introduced to wheelchair basketball , that really changed my life . I needed it therapeutically , mentally , physically , emotionally , all the ways that therapy can really benefit us .
I was competitive before my injury and that certainly didn ' t go away . I found this new sport and was really excited to jump into the world of wheelchair basketball . I played on team U . S . A ., went to the Paralympic Games , got gold medals in 2008 — that team was great — and I went on to play professional wheelchair basketball . It ’ s always shocking to people when they hear there is a professional wheelchair basketball league . I played for a team in Germany , and we went undefeated , won three cups and it was the pinnacle of my career . I returned to the U . S ., played here for a couple of years , off and on . I finally retired to pursue the next chapter of my life — settling down , getting married and having kids .
I had been an elementary school teacher , off and on , but when I had my kids , I realized that there was this huge gap in children ' s literature . Naively , I told people that I decided to write a book about all these incredible disabled athletes that I had met and who were not being shown in children ' s literature . That ’ s how my book got started . Of course , I made many mistakes because I didn ' t have any creative writing experience . I ’ m so happy that Tenacious did get published after a six-and-a-halfyear journey . I ’ m super thankful to be able to share these stories of 15 incredible individuals .
Tell us about training for the Paralympics ; how difficult was that ?
It was difficult in the sense that Paralympics and Paralympians don ' t get the same sort of resources and support as our Olympians . And so that ' s what really made it tricky .
We had to fund most of our own training . Oftentimes , many of us had to work full-time and train full-time . It lent itself well to being a student athlete , which I was since that part of my career was when I went to the University of Illinois . I got my graduate degree and I was also training for the Paralympic Games as a student athlete .
It was tricky because , with little funding or finances , we couldn ’ t just focus on the training . So there were always other barriers that were presented while we trained . Certainly there are some Olympic sports that have the same issues — the smaller
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