Team Trust Productions – A Guest Post by Ryan Wilson

A few weeks ago, Ryan Wilson contacted me to tell me about the company he created, Team Trust Productions. Team Trust is a production company that shares the stories of people with disabilities. I found it very interesting so asked Ryan if he’d like to write a guest post on my blog. I am sure that my readers will also be interested to learn more about Team Trust.

Team Trust Productions – by Ryan Wilson

As a child, I grew up in a very small town in central Illinois.

My family’s home was surrounded by cornfields, and it seemed I was the only wheelchair user in the entire county.

While that is not statistically accurate, it felt so.

I was a huge NBA fan.

I knew every player on every team, and I followed my favorite player, Shaquille O’Neal, like my life depended on it. 

Shaq was my guy, my Superhero.

I dreamt about playing alongside Shaq in the NBA. I would play basketball with my dad, and we pretended our pick-up games in the driveway were actual NBA games.

It was awesome.

As I watched Shaq’s basketball games on TV, I saw something that struck me.

It was the commercials with kids with disabilities. 

These kids looked like me — in a wheelchair, below average height — and they even had my disability, Osteogenesis Imperfecta, or OI. OI is a rare brittle bone disease.

I Didn’t Want to See That

They were always shown in the hospital, wrapped in bandages like a mummy; plugged into a number of devices; and surrounded by family, friends and, yes, doctors.

This was not what I wanted, or needed, to see.

I have broken 50 to 60 bones, and I can tell you exactly what it is like to be wrapped in bandages, plugged into devices, and lying in a hospital bed.

It’s not fun. I did not want a reminder of any of these experiences.

My belief of my own reality began to set in, and I concluded I would likely never play basketball alongside my hero.

I considered wheelchair basketball; however, I believed that was for kids with more severe disabilities than mine.

My dreaming of winning titles with Shaq became a part of the past; the hospital commercials remained ever so present.

These commercials, no doubt, were sending subtle messages of what my future may look like.

Since Ryan Couldn’t Play, He Became a Broadcaster

Then I started attending the University of Illinois. I enrolled in its journalism program to pursue the childhood dream I still had: Become a play-by-play sports announcer in the NBA. If I couldn’t play in the game, I still wanted to be a part of the atmosphere.

My first broadcast was a basketball game in the State Farm Center, formerly known as the Assembly Hall, where some of Illinois’ greatest basketball moments have taken place.

I also broadcast baseball, softball and volleyball, and a couple my games were streamed on the Big Ten Network.

At the same time, I was growing a more and more intimate relationship with Illinois’ adaptive sports program. The University of Illinois is home to the founding of wheelchair basketball, and the campus houses an official Paralympic Training Center for wheelchair racing. Many of the world’s fastest wheelchair racers train at Illinois.

When I heard 20-time Paralympic medalist Tatyana McFadden and rising star Daniel Romanchuk were frequently on campus, I knew I had to see them in action, and the wheelchair racing coach, Adam Bleakney, welcomed me with open arms into the training center.

I was awestruck by Tatyana and Daniel, and I was blown away by the athletes with a whole range of disabilities.

The athletes were about my size, and, unlike me, they donned huge shoulder muscles and six-pack abs.

Living the Dream

The athletes were living the dream I previously thought was impossible, and every single newfound friend encouraged me to reevaluate my own beliefs about my own potential.

I felt like I was learning who I was and who I could be all over again.

My independence, and life, significantly changed.

I let go of all of my personal assistants who were helping me with my activities of daily living; I pursued bigger goals; I moved out of the state of Illinois; and — slightly bragging here — I sprouted my own abs.

About Team Trust Productions

I knew others could benefit from the felt experience I lived around the adaptive athletes at Illinois, so I created Team Trust Productions, or Team Trust.

Team Trust is a production company that is designed to authentically tell the stories of persons with disabilities. 

We believe that your story and experiences could significantly help others, which was exactly what happened to me.

We know that persons with disabilities are shown in a microscopic percentage of marketing materials, including 1 percent of TV ads.

Contrarily, we know that the authentic representation of the disability community helps everybody — whether they have a disability or not — learn more about the largest minority in the world and the only minority anyone can join. 

15% of the World’s Population Has a Disability

In fact, 15 percent of the world’s population has a disability, and more kids and adults are acquiring disabilities. 

Team Trust has produced videos on persons with disabilities all around the United States. We’ve captured people with visual impairments riding gnarly waves in Hawaii, and we ran, camera in hand, alongside individuals who are paralyzed on adaptive mountain bikes in North Carolina.

My team and I are consistently exploring our own beliefs about what is possible, and we relay our perspectives with the companies, nonprofit and government entities with which we work.

Our non-disabled viewers and clients are gaining a deeper awareness and understanding of the lessons the disability community can teach us about listening, accommodations, self-care, body awareness, and just being good people.

We do encounter businesses and people who do not fully appreciate the value of telling the story of how they impact the disability community. However, once they learn how transformational just one video on a person with a disability can be, their lives are changed.

Just like mine.

It took only one story on how Paralympian Amanda McGrory became an elite athlete for me to pursue my own gold-medal-like goals.

And we hope to encourage everyone with or without a disability to pursue their own gold-medal dreams.

Click Here to Visit the Team Trust Website

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Very often, when we live with health problems, we have to give up so much. But we shouldn’t have to give up on dreams entirely. As Ryan has shown, our dreams might need to change a little in order to be practical.

Thank you, Ryan, for sharing your story with my readers. Team Trust Productions can hopefully help to make the impossible more possible for many people.