Jennifer Howitt (SFS ‘05) still very clearly remembers the first time she rolled onto a basketball court in a wheelchair.
“This other kid came up to me, flipped me onto my back and said, ‘Welcome to wheelchair basketball,’” she said. “I was like, oh my God, Dad, take me home.”
10 years later, with a gold medal from the 2004 Athens Paralympics in her hand and freshly laurelled with a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, it seems as if little can stand in the way of the carbon fiber wheels of this Georgetown senior from Orinda, Calif.
On Sept. 27, the U.S. Women’s Wheelchair Basketball Team, composed of Howitt and the U.S.’s other ten best women wheelchair athletes, defeated Australia 56-44 to win the Gold Medal. Howitt was among the starting five on the squad and played for most of what she called a hard-fought game, which was more competitive than the final score indicated.
The Paralympics are a quadrennial athletic competition in which physically disabled athletes compete on the international level.
The September success was the culmination of years of hard work, Howitt said. In the year leading to the Paralympics, she spent nearly every day lifting weights or honing her shot on the court. The team, which had been together since the 2002 Gold Cup tournament in Japan, met up throughout the United States every three or four weeks to practice together.
Howitt said that she had to balance basketball with the academic demands of Georgetown, but she also found time to create the first-ever D.C. women’s wheelchair basketball team and serve both as a player and a coach.
Howitt was confident and charming in her interview yesterday, a demeanor that she said she developed after years of challenges on the basketball court. She said she was able to find that confidence when she decided to throw her hat in the ring for the Rhodes Scholarship.
“The mental training I had for basketball really helped in the Rhodes interview,” she said of the final interview for the scholarship.
Howitt suffered a spinal cord injury while hiking, at the age of nine.
Leigh Ann Howitt said she was proud, but not surprised, by her daughter’s accomplishments.
“She went into it with the same kind of enthusiasm with which she went into sports before the accident,” she said.
At Oxford University, where Rhodes winners study after graduating college, Howitt will pursue a master’s degree in development, concentrating on the difficulties that disabled citizens in the developing world face in acquiring wheelchairs and other aid.
The scholarship marks the capstone in a career at Georgetown which has been highlighted by her successes but has included many challenges as well. As roommate Britt Childs (SFS ‘05) explained, it’s not always easy making spontaneous trips on the hilltop.
“There’s a sense of frustration sometimes,” she said. “Like when she’s stranded in the Metro or some building at Georgetown.”
Nevertheless, Howitt credited the United States with having the best aid for the disabled in the world.
