The 2024 Santos Wheelchair Rugby National Championship will be held Friday, 3 - Sunday, 5 May at Netball SA Stadium - the first time in the event’s history that it has been hosted in Adelaide.

The Santos Wheelchair Rugby National Championship is the largest annual wheelchair rugby competition in the Southern Hemisphere with Australia’s best competing for national glory.

In 2024, the Championship will be joined by the NZ Wheel Blacks and international superstars: Johnathan Hivernat (France), Park U-Cheol (South Korea) and Davy van den Dop (Netherlands) to fuel competition and bolster line-ups.

Don’t know anything about wheelchair rugby? Is it your first time attending the Nationals? Here are the 8 things you need to know before the first tip off!

1. Wheelchair Rugby is a full contact team sport where males and females play on the same team.

2. Australia are the reigning World Cup champions and currently ranked 2nd in the World. The Steelers are the most successful Paralympic team sport in Aussie history. 

3. The sport was originally called “Murderball” due to the aggressive nature of the game. It is a contact sport where collisions between wheelchairs form a major part of the game. Wheelchair rugby combines elements of rugby, basketball and handball. 

4. Wheelchair Rugby games are played across 4 quarters of 8 minutes on a regulation hardwood basketball court using a soft volleyball.

5. Wheelchair Rugby is played with 4 players on court for each team with aim being to carry the ball across the opponents’ goal line to score a point. Players have 40 seconds to do this.

6. To be eligible to play, athletes must be quadriplegic (tetraplegic). The degree to which this quad-impairment effects the athlete, leads into classification. A total of 8.0 points are allowed on the court at once and must be split up between the 4 athletes on court. Each athlete is assigned a classification based on functionality of their physical ability with 0.5 being less functional and 3.5 being most functional. If there is a female athlete on court, 8.5 points are allowed.

7. At this year’s National Championship, there are 10 teams competing across 2 divisions with major international athletes also coming to participate. This is the biggest Wheelchair Rugby event in the Southern Hemisphere.

8. You can either watch all the action live at Netball SA Stadium or catch all the matches on Foxtel and Kayo.

Photo credit to Stephen Tremain