Invictus Games 2016: Sebastiana Lopez-Arellano excels in her rookie month of wheelchair rugby

Two years ago, Sebastiana Lopez-Arellano, selective duty servicemember with the US Air Force, was an athlete. She played volleyball for the Air Force league and also spent time with the Atlanta Steam of the Legends Football league, advancing as far as the eastern conference championship in 2014. Originally from San Bernardino, California, she was stationed in Charleston for six years.

Then came her motorcycle accident a year ago, and her world had become completely different.

“I was in a coma for about a month,” Lopez-Arellano said. “When I woke up, my hands were all strapped down and I had tubes coming out of everywhere. I was on dialysis. But -- when I woke up, my family, they were all standing around me looking really sad. So I kind of wiggled around, and noticed that something was obviously wrong.”

What was wrong was that she no longer had a leg, and her hands worked differently than they used to. Lopez-Arellano’s family knew her well, though, and tried to ease her into her new body any way they knew how.

“My sister, she knows my sense of humor,” Lopez-Arellano said, “She asked me, ‘What are you going to name your stump?’ And I said, ‘Steeeve!’ It’s from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. I was having a dream right before I woke up from my coma, and the monkey was in my dream. So it’s Steve the Stump.”

Two years later, Lopez-Arellano, along with ‘Steve the Stump,’ is still an athlete. She competed with USA’s gold-winning rugby team, drawing into the lineup for the semifinals against Australia, which the US defeated 36-15. Fresh from the tournament floor, she was still grinning like mad as she pushed her chair over to seated journalists. She is one of only two women in the four final rugby teams that made semifinals at the Invictus Games in Orlando.

Lopez-Arellano’s role on the team is as a speedy, skilled offensive player who is sometimes used as, well, a literal projectile by her teammates. In wheelchair rugby (also known as “murderball”), the entire chair is technically the “ball” because the player has to cross the goal line with both wheels while holding the ball to score. So it makes sense as a tactic that players can propel teammates as if they and the ball are one.

In her second breakaway during the semifinal game against Australia, Lopez-Arellano used her speed and wheeling agility to build up a head of steam and race toward the goal line. Once there, two of her teammates rammed her forward, using the strength of their upper arms, wheels, and chairs to help propel Lopez-Arellano and the ball past the Australian defenders.

“It’s all my teammates,” Lopez-Arellano said with the kind of modesty that seems universal to team sports. “They literally pushed me. I said, ‘Don’t give me the ball!’ They were like, ‘You’re gonna score.’ I was like, ‘Oh shit.’”

Even though Lopez-Arellano has been playing rugby for only a month, she’s already making a difference on the court. “I was very nervous. I was all, ‘Oh man, I don’t wanna go in there and mess up.’ And my hands -- they don’t work right. I just didn’t want to let my teammates down. So when they put me in there I thought, well, I guess I’ve got to step up. And my teammates helped me, for sure.”

Of her three goals, two were from the kind of dirty scrum deep in the offensive zone that non-wheelchair rugby players would be proud to call their own. The crowd at HP Arena went wild when Lopez-Arellano crossed the goal line, and she became an instant hero to many at the Invictus Games.

The team came together a month ago in preparation for the Invictus Games, and Lopez-Arellano is not the only new player. “A lot of guys on the team have never played before,” she said.

She prepared for rugby by watching the documentary “Murderball” after being invited to play by a teammate.

“Jesse [Graham], he introduced me to rugby,” Lopez-Arellano explained. “He’s a [quadriplegic], he told me to come out and play with the team, he said, ‘If you qualify -- we don’t have any females, it would be awesome if you’d come.’ I’m down for everything. I had a motorcycle accident, so I like speed, I like adrenaline.”

The challenge of rugby is that it’s physical, allowing full contact of chairs during gameplay, sometimes resulting in a flipped chair from the roughness of the impact.

“My guys prepared me by flipping me a few times,” Lopez-Arellano said. “They didn’t go easy on me. The first day that I came out with my hands all taped, they came at me and hit me hard. They hit me harder than any of our opponents, so they prepared me well for this game.”

The best part of rugby, for Lopez-Arellano, is the feeling of crossing that goal line.

“I wouldn’t trade that moment for anything,” she said. “I wanted to cry, and thought, Oh my god, I’m on TV, don’t cry.”

Would she recommend wheelchair rugby to other wounded veterans? Yes, she says, because it’s “nothing” compared to what everyone’s been through.

“If you’re scared for whatever reason, everybody here has been through much worse. Whether it’s trauma, whether it’s Post-Traumatic Stress, there’s nothing harder than what we’ve already been through. So if you can do that, a game of rugby is nothing. And the camaraderie -- everybody’s awesome.”

Lopez-Arellano is still living at Walter Reed hospital in Maryland where she is receiving therapy and treatment. She says that occupational therapy is the toughest challenge she’s encountered yet. “Honestly, the hardest part of occupational therapy is the mental game,” she said. “You don’t realize how much you need your hands until you don’t have them. So I started doing my makeup, and I can write now.”

“I went from them telling me that I wouldn’t use my hands ever again, to playing rugby.”