A whole generation of people who started disabled student services and campus wheelchair sports teams is passing away. I caught this obituary from over the weekend. Jim Hayes was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1949. He injured his spinal cord in a diving accident on his 18th birthday. Hayes went on to be student body president at his junior college, then president of the Handicapped Student Association at the University of Texas-Arlington. After his graduated in 1974, he took a job on the Arlington campus, launching the Office for Students with Disabilities. Later, he was the ADA compliance coordinator on campus.Jim Hayes also had a lifelong passion for sports. He started wheelchair basketball and wheelchair tennis programs at UTA. In 2000 he became full-time coach of the Moving Mavs --who won seven National Wheelchair Basketball titles under Hayes' direction. Hayes was a wheelchair road racer himself; he won a gold medal at the 1984 Paralympics, and he volunteered at the National Veterans Wheelchair Games. In 2004, one of his former students, Randy Snow, became the first wheelchair athlete inducted into the Olympic Hall of Fame. UTA students or alumni have represented their home nations in every Paralympics Summer Games since 1984. As a result of Jim Hayes' work, the UTA sports program was one of the first in the US to give full athletic scholarships to physically-disabled students.
Hayes died Friday, at the age of 58.
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