Jessica Lehman smiles and laughs a little when she recounts the time she flipped a guy over in his wheelchair.
But before you grab the torches and pitchforks and organize a protest march, calm down and read on. Lehman didn’t mean to unseat the gent — but he did have it coming.
Lehman, 30, is a petite blonde with a ready smile and a mellifluous laugh. But when she’s out on the court playing power soccer, don’t expect any favors from Ms. Nice Gal.
Lehman has been disabled since birth with spinal muscular atrophy, or SMA, and until recently her athletic career was limited to scorekeeping for phys ed class kickball. But that all changed when she went to her first power soccer game.
Power soccer — power chair football in the rest of the world — is, to put it simply, soccer in wheelchairs. Three position players and a goalkeeper on both sides maneuver about in power chairs, executing all the complex crosses, give-and-goes and corner kicks you’d see in a game of what Lehman calls “non-disabled soccer.”
Hard shots are generated by spinning and deflecting the over-sized, 13-inch diameter ball off of a “foot guard,” a bulky metal contraption resembling a linebacker’s facemask. It’s 40 minutes of stress and exercise — and it’s not exactly a non-contact sport, as Lehman and the fellow she flipped over while playing defense discovered. Later she also got her own lesson.
“I was spinning and I hit somebody, and my knee flew into my joystick. I don’t know what happened — I didn’t break anything — but I woke up in the middle of the night with the most excruciating pain I’d ever had. It took three weeks to get better,” said Lehman, a member of the U.S. national power soccer team, recalling her first sports injury.
She grew up in Sacramento, where her family attended Reform Congregation B’nai Israel, where she was bat mitzvahed. The Emeryville resident graduated from Stanford University and spends her non-soccer hours working on behalf of the disabled community as an organizer for the Hayward-based Community Resources for Independent Living.
Lehman admits she was “hooked” on power soccer within a matter of minutes. Still, she didn’t exactly take to the game as naturally as Harry Potter did to his broomstick. When she first snapped on a foot guard and hit the court two years ago, she admits that there were times when she confused which goal she was attacking and which she was defending.
But the tenacity that has served her well in everyday life also has proved useful in the sporting world. “Anyone will tell you that I’m incredibly competitive and want to win,” she said.
Her passing and ball-handing ability blossomed and she even picked up a “signature move” (Lehman is unusually adept at controlling the ball while moving backward, not unlike a hockey defenseman gliding over his own blue line).
She quickly qualified for one of eight spots on the U.S. national team and will be playing in the sport’s first World Cup this October in Japan. Locally she stars for Berkeley’s Bay Area Outreach Recreation Program, better known as “BORP.”
“No, it’s not the catchiest name. Other teams are called ‘Sudden Impact’ or ‘The Steamrollers.’ We’re BORP,” she says with a chuckle.
The local season starts up again on Sept. 22 — “which just so happens to be Yom Kippur. I’m not so happy about that. I won’t be playing.”
Lehman is in the midst of raising $10,000 to fund her trip to Japan for the World Cup. She hopes to show the world that, yes, disabled people can compete in sports — which comes as news for even some disabled people.
“The rest of my family doesn’t have disabilities, and there’s no athletic gene in my family — or so we thought,” she said with a smile.
“Part of covering sports [in the media] should be covering power soccer,” she said. “It’s not just a disability human interest story.”