Wheelchair Tennis Marks 50 Years as World Team Cup Plays Out in Orlando

Fifty years ago, a teenager named Brad Parks was paralyzed in a freestyle skiing accident at age 18. He didn't quit sports. He built a new one.

Parks founded wheelchair tennis in 1976, and this week the sport he created is marking its 50th anniversary while professional players compete for their countries in the World Team Cup at the USTA's National Campus in Orlando, according to PBS News.

From Hospital Bed to Grand Slam

Parks told PBS News the idea came to him in the hospital, when someone mentioned wheelchair basketball. He wanted to be a better tennis player, so he asked a simple question: if you can play wheelchair basketball, why not tennis?

That question turned into a sport now embedded in all four Grand Slams, per PBS News. Tennis is one of the most tradition-bound sports on the planet, and getting a wholly new discipline onto the same courts as Wimbledon and the US Open took decades of competing, winning, and proving the skeptics wrong.

Parks didn't get there by demanding a seat at the table. He got there by showing up on the table.

Nobody Handed Them Anything

The early years were brutal, and not in the way people might assume. Parks told PBS News that when he and other players first rolled onto tennis courts, club pros would come over and ask what they were doing. People worried the chairs would damage the courts. Nobody believed they were real athletes.

Wheelchair tennis didn't grow because some diversity mandate forced clubs to make room. It grew because players like Parks kept showing up, kept competing, and eventually made it impossible to ignore how good they were. Acceptance came from performance, not policy.

The Sport Today

Fifty years on, wheelchair tennis has a player development pipeline, growing sponsorships, and broadcast deals that are expanding its fan base, according to PBS News. The World Team Cup underway in Orlando this week is part of the anniversary celebration, with national teams competing at the USTA's National Campus.

PBS News anchor Amna Nawaz, who reported the piece as part of the network's CANVAS series on the culture of sport, also covered the sport up close at the U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows, New York, showing the speed, agility, and power the athletes bring to the game on two wheels.

Parks, now in his late 60s, told PBS News he's still amazed watching how far the players have taken it. His exact words: it's fantastic to see how the sport has progressed and improved over the years.

What's Left Unanswered

PBS News's report doesn't get into hard numbers, no attendance figures, no specific sponsorship dollar amounts, no broadcast ratings. If wheelchair tennis really is riding a new wave of popularity, as the segment's headline claims, viewers deserve the actual figures behind that claim, not just a general sense that things are trending up.

Still, the trajectory described is real and verifiable at the structural level: a sport that didn't exist in organized professional form until 1976 is now part of every Grand Slam. The next marker to watch is whether the broadcast and sponsorship growth PBS News describes shows up in hard numbers when USTA and Grand Slam organizers release their 2026 wheelchair division viewership and prize money figures.