Sue Hobbs PLY

At a time when there were no other women playing the sport, Sue Hobbs set her sights on becoming a champion player in wheelchair basketball. At the age of 19 and already a promising athlete, Hobbs was struck by a car in 1976 and rendered a paraplegic.

Putting the incident behind her, Sue travelled across the country for over a decade, encouraging women to take up the sport. Eventually her hard work and determination paid off, when in 1989 she founded and captained the first women’s national wheelchair basketball team – the original Australian Gliders, who contested their first international tournament in 1989.

Hobbs was again part of the Australian Gliders when the team qualified for the 1992 Paralympics in Barcelona, where they finished an outstanding fourth. She was the first female athlete to be inducted into the Wheelchair Basketball Hall of Fame, and in 2012, Basketball Australia established the Sue Hobbs Medal for Women’s Wheelchair International Player of the Year.