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Wins over the Netherlands’ women’s wheelchair basketball team are so rare that its Paralympic opponents have been settling for moral victories.
Spain, an upstart among the European powerhouses, held the team, known as the Dutch Angels, to a 3-point lead at halftime in Wednesday’s quarterfinal, but never recovered from a third-quarter blasting in a 61-43 loss. “We competed for 32 minutes and we were close,” said Franck Belen, Spain’s coach. “It was something special for us because they are the big team and we were the little team.”
“They’re bigger than us, faster than us, but we can hang with them for sure,” Ixhelt González of the United States said after her team lost, 69-56, in pool play on Saturday.
Germany, one of the most physical teams in the competition, mauled the leading Dutch scorer, Mariska Beijer, during a bludgeoning battle and took solace in its losing effort. “We fought,” said Mareike Miller, a German who won gold at the 2012 London Games. “I think we did OK, and now we want to move forward and beat some of the other teams.”
The Dutch, who face Canada in a Paralympic semifinal on Friday, arrived in Paris as something of a para sports dynasty, having won seven consecutive international tournaments since 2017. Their streak stretches across four European titles and two world championships, with Paralympic gold at the Tokyo Games in 2021 in the mix.
Through the team’s first four Paralympics games this year, the Netherlands averaged a 24-point margin of victory, but that figure was skewed by a 53-point win over Japan in which a Japanese guard was toppled out of her chair by a hard screen and carted off on a stretcher.
Beijer, whose long reach and speed make her one of the world’s most potent players, confirmed the Dutch’s goal before the start of play: “To win every single game. I mean, we are defending Paralympic champions.” She added that so much winning had placed a target on the team. “But we know we can beat everyone, but we have to play our best basketball to be able to do that, because there are really good teams here.”
The Netherlands’ style isn’t just soul-crushing power. When Gertjan van der Linden, a former player on the Dutch men’s wheelchair team, took over as coach of the women’s national team in 2005, he hoped to remake it in his image. He had built his game on the no-look passes and flashy fast breaks of his idol, Magic Johnson, becoming a five-time Paralympian (he won gold in 1992) and the world’s top wheelchair basketball player in 1991.
“On my team, I was the best point guard in the world,” he said. A double amputee, van der Linden usually roams the sidelines on his stumps and mixes coaching aphorisms about trusting the process with dry wit. These Games are his last tournament as head coach before he takes over the Italian men’s national team in January.
As a player, he said, he wanted to speed up play in wheelchair games, which he found gratingly slow, and close the gap between the effectiveness of the least impaired players (classified as 4 or 4.5) and their more restricted teammates (1s and 1.5s).
In its current iteration, the Netherlands team is built around Beijer and a few other tall high-point players who can create mismatches around the court while the low-point players set screens and picks. The tactic is particularly effective in wheelchair basketball, where a good screen makes it nearly impossible for a defender to change direction and contest a shot.
When the Netherlands went on an 8-0 run against Spain in the third quarter of the quarterfinal, Beijer had entire seconds to set up her shots over the outstretched arms of defenders whose chairs were out of position.
“It’s quicker decision making in able-bodied basketball,” Irene Sloof, a Dutch assistant coach, said. “When you do it right here, you have a lot of time to make your decisions.”
Sloof joined van der Linden’s staff in 2011, the year the team’s mission got supercharged. That was when the Dutch national training facility opened in Arnhem, with male and female Paralympic athletes receiving monthly salaries, training full-time with their teams and participating in mixed-gender league play. The changes helped the Netherlands quickly close the competitive gap with bigger, richer countries like the United States and Germany.
Sloof, who had returned to the Netherlands after playing point guard at Liberty University in Virginia, enjoyed coaching kids’ camps, but was frustrated by the limits some coaches placed on players’ development.
“There was a very conservative culture within training wheelchair basketball,” she said. She remembered suggesting one-on-one or four-on-three drills to encourage quicker decision-making against the defense. “They said, ‘Oh we can’t.’ I’m like, ‘Yes, you can.’ It was normal drills that I was used to in able-body basketball,” she said.
Van der Linden brought her onboard as a shooting coach but soon realized that, as an assistant, Sloof could help blur the tactical distinctions between the wheelchair and able-bodied games. She later took over the development program for youth-level players.
“That was the vision,” van der Linden said. “To mix able-bodied basketball from the U.S. with wheelchair basketball.”
The team took bronze at the London Games, but was dejected when the program’s tactical and professional growth yielded the same result in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
ilos
“We were so, so focused on being physically strong,” said Jitske Visser, the Dutch captain. “I still believe that in Rio, we really had a squad to win the gold. Physically, we were really able to. But we’re not as much of a team as we are right now. Like connecting on a mental level.”
By the next year’s European Championship, Visser said, players knew that they needed to build chemistry in addition to muscle. “We’re just going to have fun, that was the main focus,” she said. “We’re just going to have fun and see. We’re going to do our best, you know. And then we won gold.”
She added, “The first tournament with this group and it was mostly, I think, because everyone was so excited. It was like a new page we turned.”
Players said the difference was talking: They vocalized critiques and praise of one another loudly, in real time, and didn’t let mistakes fester. Bo Kramer is a 4.5 whose shooting and gambling defense are nearly as essential to the Netherlands as her mouth.
“You always need one or two girls that shout the hardest on-court. If you do that, it makes it easier,” she said, adding that pointing out errors and good shots can keep teammates on the same page about what’s working during games. Off the court at the Paralympics, they kept in sync by screening episodes of “Emily in Paris” together.
Julia van der Sprong, a towering shot blocker, began playing for the team in 2017 for that first European title. She was 18, and only a year removed from the onset of a spinal cord injury that necessitated her use of a wheelchair. As the competition in women’s wheelchair basketball has gotten stronger and opponents have carried their grudges from old tournaments into this one, the Dutch team is aware of its distinction, she said.
“Most of the girls on other teams know how to lose tournaments. I don’t know how that is,” she said. “It’s really special to be on a team like this. But, yeah, I know it’s going to be hard when we’re going to lose. It will happen one day. Everybody knows that, I think. But hopefully not now and not within a few years.”
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