BRONX, N.Y. (Aug. 24, 2019) - Three years in the making. The wait was over.

The highly-anticipated CUNY Wheelchair Basketball Team made its long-awaited debut with its first organized team practice at "The Swamp" at Hostos Community College in the Bronx on Saturday afternoon.

In front of a fantastic turnout, the prospective CUNY student-athletes took part in shooting drills and 5-on-5 scrimmages, led by the team's head coach Ryan Martin.

"It's just been an awesome process to see what's possible for the prospective student-athletes in CUNY," Martin said. "We will start with practices and continue to farm out where our current students with disabilities want future programming. We have 25 campuses and over 4,000 students with mobility impairment. And, to be able to address the needs at various different campuses is going to be the challenge, but it is a great opportunity. It is a tremendous credit to CUNY's commitment to universal design."

Martin also described: "Wheelchair basketball has the opportunity to be a transformative experience in adaptive sports. We want to offer that opportunity for prospective student-athletes to use it as a vehicle for greater success. We want to see them go through our CUNY LEADS program, become employed and set that bar that we expect to set for our student-athletes. We are in the higher education space and that's what this needs to be about, ultimately."

The practice came just over a full year after CUNY hosted its first-ever wheelchair basketball clinic last August at Hostos, as an effort to recruit and gauge interest in the team.

"I am very pleased with how it all has come together, with the three clinics that we have done in three different boroughs at three different CUNY schools, and then bringing Ryan (Martin) aboard has been the game-changer," CUNYAC Executive Director Zak Ivkovic exclaimed. "Ryan's vision takes us to another level. He wants to build a team that can be successful right away. He is pushing us in all of the right directions. This partnership has been phenomenal for us."

Destini Mitchell-Murray, a recent Hostos graduate and advocator for a CUNY adaptive sports program, expressed her excitement: "I am happy that my voice was heard. We (at CUNY) have a lot of students that are disabled, and you do not need to be disabled to play an adaptive sport. I am excited to see where it goes from here."

Last May, the CUNY Athletic Conference announced the formation of a varsity wheelchair basketball team -- the first-ever of its kind on the Eastern seaboard. Until that point, the closest varsity collegiate program in the East had resided at Edinboro University in Western Pennsylvania. Additionally, Martin partnered with PER4MAX and U.S. Paralympics to donate 10 high-performance wheelchairs to the cause (worth up to $50,000).

"It's hard to capture what a remarkable day this has been. We mapped this out as a blueprint, and to see it bear fruit today, is very exciting. It's hard to believe that this is really happening, but it is," said CUNY Vice Chancellor for Student Inclusion Initiatives Christopher Rosa. "Our goal is to build a foundation for a sustainable high-level competitive inclusive athletics program, starting with wheelchair basketball. Today was an important first step of letting the New York City and greater Metropolitan area community of wheelchair athletes know that we are here and inclusive sports is open for business at CUNY. We are committed to recruiting the highest quality wheelchair student-athletes to follow their dreams at CUNY and to serve as a rallying port for our community of students with disabilities."

The goal of CUNY’s Inclusive and Adaptive Sports platform is to engage student-athletes with disabilities in four sports -- basketball, track and field, swimming and tennis -- as a collegiate model for its University’s campuses to adopt.