From the ski slopes to the tennis court: How an aspiring Paralympian balances it all

Tennis participation soared in the United States last year as people of all ages sought a safe way to stay active during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Players, new and old, of all ages and ability levels flocked to courts across the country.

Among them? An aspiring Paralympian. 

Nineteen-year-old Kyle Taulman has been participating in wheelchair sports since the age of 5, after becoming paralyzed as a result of the Stage 3, high-risk neuroblastoma that wrapped around his spinal cord at age 2. After relocating from Freeport, Illinois to Steamboat Springs, Colo. with his family, the young Taulman ultimately found his athletic niche in para-alpine skiing, and is a prospect to represent Team USA at the 2022 Winter Paralympics in Beijing, China. 

Having participated in many adaptive sports including tennis in his youth while his mother, Julie, helped to grow them as the executive director of Steamboat Adaptive Recreational Sports (STARS) for more than 10 years, Taulman's rediscovery of tennis was prompted by both the pandemic and another relocation.

After his high school graduation, his family moved from up in the mountains to Golden, on the Front Range in the foothills. 

"In tennis, you're always constantly moving. You're keeping a figure-eight pattern as much as you can. You have to turn your back to the ball quite a lot and you have to keep watching the ball. One thing that I've really noticed so far about playing more tennis is that it helps my core strength a lot," Taulman said.

"With the complete injury that I have, it's a lot harder for me to work on my core strength in the gym because I just don't have the same balance as some other people. Playing tennis, I feel, has really helped my skiing in that aspect because in tennis, you're pushing all the time, really putting all your power to the push and that takes core strength to do that. I've been able to actually change my skiing and change my entire technique to be a faster skier.

"Now that I have more strength, it allows me to be more dynamic in my movement with my turns, moving forward or backwards for what I need for a different turn. I wouldn't have been able to do that without that strength from tennis."

A seasoned competitor in ski races, Taulman got to put the tennis skills honed on the practice court to the test for the first time when he competed at the 2021 College Wheelchair Tennis Championships at the USTA National Campus in Orlando, Fla. in April.

"I'd never played a tennis tournament at all before, but it was a super fun experience," he said.

"The campus is just beautiful. I haven't been doing tennis for very long, but I can really appreciate athletic campuses because I've been to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and Lake Placid. One of the coolest things of being there was seeing that the courts had live streaming. It was kind of funny, too, because I'm not used to my parents being able to see an entire sport that I do.

"That was a different experience for them. In skiing, you're up on a mountain, so even if they're at the bottom, they can only see a portion of what you're doing. With this, my parents and my grandparents were able to watch [a full match], which was really cool."

Team USA will have a full complement of tennis players competing when the Tokyo Paralympics begin in two weeks, but Taulman is, for now, staying much closer to home. Having already been a mentor for younger athletes while training at the National Sports Center for the Disabled in Winter Park, Colo., he's working with a task force at his university to bring more organized adaptive sports - starting with tennis - to Boulder.