Kent Law School academics Dr Flora Renz and Dr Matt Howard have been awarded a BA/Leverhulme small grant for a new research project called ‘Laws of the Game: Wheelchair Rugby Regulations and Participant Perception in Gender Neutral and Inclusive Sports’. This will be a two year funded project to explore perceptions of fairness, inclusion and equality in the context of a mixed-sex team based parasport.
Wheelchair rugby, previously known as ‘murderball’, is by now a well-established parasport version of standard rugby. Wheelchair rugby operates a relatively complex player classification system to ensure parity and fairness between teams composed of players with often vastly different kinds of impairments, from tetraplegia to multiple limb defects. It has attracted interest from scholars in sports science and psychology. Less attention has been paid to the unique features of wheelchair rugby as a regulatory system, that requires a specific approach to notions of fairness, equality and disability. Wheelchair rugby is unusual compared to other sports in that it is a full contact sport, although a wheelchair to wheelchair rather than person to person contact sport, that is played in mixed sex teams. This is particularly notable because in July of 2022 both the Rugby Football Union and Rugby Football League updated their policies to limit participation in women’s rugby to players who were assigned female at birth, thereby excluding transgender women and non-binary people. This decision had been preceded by several years of intense and highly acrimonious campaigning by trans groups, anti-trans groups, and current and former rugby players about this issue.
In contrast, wheelchair rugby, which was established in Canada in the 1970s as an alternative to wheelchair basketball, has been a mixed sport since it was included in the Paralympics in 2000. Wheelchair rugby is played with four players for each team on the court at any one time. Each player is assigned a score between 0.5 and 4.0 based on their level of impairment. The lower the score, the more significant an athlete’s impairment is judged to be. When women were first included in wheelchair rugby teams, the classification system was amended, with teams now being allowed an extra 0.5 points for each female player on the court, i.e. a team with two female players on the court is allowed a combined score of 9.0 rather than 8.0. This rule change was intended to enhance inclusion, by incentivising teams to not just include female players, but to ensure they are active players on the court. At the same time the classification bonus is also aimed at ensuring fairness, by effectively treating female players has having a more significant impairment.
Given the existing research on wheelchair rugby has primarily focused on wheelchair rugby as a sport, with an emphasis on participant access, this project instead seeks to approach wheelchair rugby as a specific example of a regulatory regime designed for equality and inclusion, both across impairments and from a gender perspective. As part of this project, we want to investigate how those involved in the sport understand this regulatory regime to engage with concepts such as fairness, equality and inclusion. A better understanding of these concepts in the context of wheelchair rugby would also aid in a better understanding of how these concepts can and should operate in other regulatory settings. The funding award for this project is particularly timely given a recent rule change at the start of 2025 that means less disabled female players are now given an even greater adjustment (1.0 points) to their classification score than before, while more disabled female players retain the same adjustment (0.5 points).