In this bonus episode of the Mirror Falls podcast, host Tod Maffin interviews his wife, Jocelyn Maffin, a former Canadian national wheelchair‑basketball player and current Associate Director of Spinal Cord Injury BC. The conversation walks through how wheelchair basketball is played—court size, rules, and the point‑classification system that balances player functional levels. They discuss the sport’s physicality, including chair‑to‑chair contact, dribbling challenges, and fouling strategies. Jocelyn recounts Canada’s historic dominance (four consecutive Paralympic golds, an unbeaten 16‑0 run) and attributes it to the integration of able‑bodied athletes in domestic leagues, which raises the overall level of play. Equipment costs are highlighted, with sport wheelchairs costing $7‑8 k and wheels needing frequent replacement, making the sport financially demanding. Jocelyn shares personal anecdotes about being the team’s “bruiser,” using intentional fouls to force turnovers, and the emotional difficulty of leaving elite sport for a medical career. The interview expands to international perspectives, noting limited sponsorship in Canada versus semi‑professional leagues in Europe, and contrasts wheelchair basketball with wheelchair rugby (formerly “murderball”). Finally, they describe public showcase moments—halftime shows at NBA‑affiliated games—that challenge stereotypes about disability, emphasizing strength, resilience, and competitive spirit.
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Welcome to another bonus episode of Mirror Falls. If you haven't listened to this week's episode about the farmers market, you should do that now. If you have listened and you're worried this series just took a hard left into something dark, Do not worry, this is still a story about decent people with complicated pasts. The stakes may rise a little as you learn more about the town's secrets, but I promise the heart will always stay where it's been: gentle, funny, and Canadian. In the last episode, we met Jocelyn, who runs the Dark Side of the Moon coffee shop. The character is a former wheelchair basketball player. She is based partly on my next guest, who was on Canada's national team for the sport. Her name is Jocelyn Maffin. Yes, She's my wife and she joins me now from her office, which is upstairs and past the guest bedroom. Hello.
Hi.
I wanna talk about Canada's contributions to wheelchair basketball, basketball, because that's a huge part of the story. But can you walk us through how it's played? Is it the same size court, the same basket and all that stuff?
Yep. The, we play on, I should clarify, I don't play anymore, but the sport is played on um, a regulation college-sized court, um, with the same 3-point line. Uh, we play with the wide key, which means you're a bit further away from the basket than what I'd gather like younger athletes play with, and the same like half court and everything. Like, it's the same. We rent regular college gyms to play in.
And can you Tell us about the point system.
Each player gets a point, a point level based on their function. So people like me with, who are paraplegics, I can't use my legs at all and only some of my ab muscles work. So I'm a 1.0. People with higher functional levels, so like a below the knee amputee would be a 4 or a 4.5 and you can only have a limit of 14 points on the court playing at once for each team. And so there's a lot of quick math that is done.
So you could stack like, like 3 high-point people, or you could have like 10 low-point people?
Well, only 5 people are allowed on the court at once. Okay. But yeah, like you, you end up developing lineups based on the role that your players tend to play and their point value.
Is the game itself any different?
We still have the same double dribble violation. We don't really call it that, but you can touch the ball twice before you have to do something with it, which is either pass, shoot, or dribble. And someone who plays regular standup basketball might have trouble at first because learning to dribble is, is a cert— is like one of the fundamental skills. And we play in wheelchairs. They have a lot of camber. The wheels are very severely tilted for maneuverability. And so it's, when you're new, it's easy to accidentally bounce it off your wheel and then it shoots off toward the sidelines. And so yeah, you dribbling is not done a lot except to carry the ball to the half court line.
Right.
Passing and, uh, shooting are really all you can do cuz people, they're all the same height as you. They can steal it.
I think people are often surprised by how physical wheelchair basketball is. What does contact look like in a game? And also what crosses the line?
It is a very physical, very fast game. And we play in sport wheelchairs that are 25 pounds. There's no jumping in this game, right? So contact is the collision of the chairs with each other. And a violation is, for example, a common one, when you aren't far enough ahead of another player when you are kind of trying to steal the ball from them or wheeling quickly alongside, you didn't have position. And so that would be a violation for the foul, like basically cutting into their lane. There's a lot of unallowed contact with hands on arms while someone's shooting because nobody's jumping. So that's— there's no way to get away from everyone around you. Right.
Where, where does Canada fit in all this? How dominant are we in the sport?
Well, when I was playing from 1997 to about 2008, we had what was called the winningest team in history, and that was the women's Paralympic team in Canada. And I got the extreme fortune to learn alongside the winningest coach of the winningest team and most of the players. And I think that is the only reason why I was ever on the national pool, because I had that kind of coaching and those people around me. That team won, I believe, 4 gold medals in a row. I think they were like 16-0 in international play.
Why, why do you think Canada's so strong?
I think it's because we play with able-bodied athletes. In international play, like Paralympic and Paralympic qualifiers, non-disabled athletes are not allowed. You have to be classifiable. I know that gets a little complicated, 'cause sometimes people wanna play so much they make themselves classifiable. Wow. Those able-bodied, non-disabled athletes in domestic wheelchair basketball in Canada, they can play all the way up to our national championships, and they force us to be better, even when we don't have enough people to play in any one metro area other than Toronto without them. That I think makes us faster and stronger.
Is it an expensive sport to play?
Well, I mean, when hockey's your national sport, everything's relative, right? Yes. The chairs are quite expensive. And until you are an elite player, you rely on your club team who usually has a set of chairs and they don't belong to you. You can't do anything drastic to them, but the chairs themselves are I'm trying to think of what they would be now, $7,000, $8,000. The types of wheels you need, they're almost a consumable item because they get bent and, you know, they don't last for more than like 2, 3 seasons. So I would say it is expensive, especially for a lot of disabled people who have a much higher unemployment rate.
The part in the story about a coach sending in the fictional Jocelyn as a bruiser, that was actually you. Like whenever I brag about you, when wheelchair basketball comes up, I always say she was like the Tod Bertuzzi of wheelchair basketball, which no one understands the reference. I think I even put it in the episode this time. Tod Bertuzzi was a bruiser for, I think, the Canucks.
Yeah.
Yeah. And he was like, he didn't score well, he didn't skate well. The only thing he could really do is just go up and beat people up on the ice. Well, in— Was that unfair for me to call you that?
You might laugh at to see me now because I am the shortest person on the team. That's partly due to my disability, but I was always fast. I started using a wheelchair at 9 years old, so my body and my sort of musculature adapted to that. And I've always been really fast. But I suspect that was what I was asked to do partly because I was not a great shooter. I would get in there, and I loved the contact, and I was pretty strong for my size. And so lower point players are, are often going to have several fouls left to be taken because we aren't getting hit as much as the higher point players. And so near the end of the game, coach would be like, Jocelyn, you have 5 fouls left. I want you to foul out before the end of the game.
And, and the purpose of that is what?
Oh, it's just to force a turnover if we're behind. And it's coming near the end of the game, every foul stops the game and forces the other team to inbound the ball from the end or the sideline. And if you are full-court pressing that, then you are trying to get that ball back from them so that you can score another few points. It's just, it's, I don't know where it lies in the scheme of like modern wheelchair basketball, but that was certainly something I was asked to do more than once.
Was it hard to leave the sport behind?
Oh my God, so hard. I had to choose between finishing my degree and like moving on with my life and not being constantly like student-level poor, or continuing, like redoubling my efforts to get onto the national team because I, I was left behind for the Paralympics once and for a qualifying tournament once, and I took a look around me from my colleagues who were competing for the same role. And when you're a comp, a point value, you're competing against people of that functional level really. And I looked around and I saw amazing women with like far better skills than mine had just popped up around the country. And I was like, I can't compete against that unless I make a very big change in my life. And I have to tell you, I hated everything about it except playing. I hated going to the gym.
Right.
So I was, and I, at that point, I finally enjoyed university and I just was like, I wanted to be, go into medicine. And I was like, that's, that's where I need to put my efforts. And I don't regret it, but it was hard. I really loved the sport. It was really distracting. We had to travel a ton to compete and I just couldn't focus.
Did playing for Canada shape how you saw your own disability?
Playing for Canada, I mean, playing against other countries showed me that not every country saw disabled people in the same way. I think some of the folks we would play against, and this is a sport dominated by people with hand and arm function, at least we would see teams of people from countries that are westernized, you know, advanced countries, and they would have caregivers that pushed them on the court and like did everything for them, which is kind of a foreign concept to us. And on the other side, we would see our American competitors playing in the absolute best technology ever because they have competitive brands for wheelchairs and such making big levels of money.
And so, of course, yeah, sponsors, right, right.
And there's a little bit of that in Canada, but not nearly as much because there's, there's not paying people in Canada for that kind of thing. So yeah, you do learn and then you— I learned that in Europe they have a semi-pro wheelchair basketball league where a lot of my teammates would go to Europe for the summer and play wheelchair basketball in the league and earn some money and see part of Europe. And that also shows you a little something like they, that culture has moved on and seen wheelchair sport as something worth watching for entertainment.
Before I let you go, what is murderball? Is that just a different way of saying wheelchair basketball?
No, no, no. Murderball is the original name given to what's called wheelchair rugby now. Was called quad rugby when the movie Murderball was made. And I actually work with the guy who invented it. And quad rugby is a very cool sport. Very quickly, it's— they have crazy tank-style wheelchairs, and it's a sport meant for people with upper limb impairments like quadriplegia or amputations to play indoor on a— they play with a volleyball on a basketball court, and it's a very horizontal game, but it's very fast and it's loud. It's all about crashing chairs into each other, and it's kind of amazing.
That, I think, was the— that was the most horrifying part of seeing wheelchair basketball when we first started dating. And maybe it's because society, or me, you know, you see people in a wheelchair and you think you've got to take more care of them, or you know, precious isn't the right word, but you know, like they have a certain level of vulnerability. Yeah, exactly. And so you wanna make sure that, and then I, you know, I saw wheelchair basketball players smashing into each other and crashing and videos of you flipping over in your chair and it kind of shocked me.
I got a chance, I think 3 times to play at the halftime of the Grizzlies games, which is the short-lived NBA franchise in Vancouver. And we learned that they don't wanna see basket— wheelchair ball the way we play it. They wanna see excitement, entertainment. And so we kind of practice a few things to just show off some of the more fun aspects. It is real, it just doesn't happen in the average 5-minute game.
Oh, so there was more crashing and more—
Yeah, we just allowed ourselves to have more fun. And so one year when the national team was all in Vancouver playing, our, like, doing our national camp, we got the chance to play at halftime and I was able to go with them. And there's one player from Quebec called Neuf, guess what her number is, who had a hemipelvectomy. So she has one leg and was missing part of her pelvis. And so she's so narrow and speedy, like amazing, amazing athlete who played for like 20 years. And she, catches the ball. She's super fast and maneuverable. And then someone goes out to pick her, to, like, keep her out of play, and she flips right over the top, like, their lap, does a somersault, catches the ball, and flips back up. And the entire place was like, "Oh!" And in those moments, you realize that people, they have been cured of their notion that all people with disabilities are vulnerable and need protection. Yeah, I think, I think there's reason to protect each other, but that was a fun thing. There is a lot about wheelchair sport that gives us a chance to show off our strength and resilience and competitive spirit on a playing field that's not just about like how inspiring we are.
Thank you for letting me interrupt your day.
Well, I've got coffee, so it didn't matter.
Jocelyn Maffin is a former national team player and coach for wheelchair basketball. Today she is Associate Director of Spinal Cord Injury BC. She lives with me in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. Next week, the shocking season finale of Mirror Falls. Happy alone, just me, myself, and I.
