The Sussex Bears and Birchwood

2019 has been an incredible year so far for Birchwood and it just continues to get better; we're so please to announce the official partnership between Birchwood Group and Sussex Bears Wheelchair Basketball.

Ricky Perrin is the man in charge of The Sussex Bears Wheelchair Basketball and has been nothing but full of enthusiasm, passion and dedication since we initially started chatting. After moving from London to the East of Brighton, Ricky began to notice the huge difference between the two places in terms of development and opportunities where sports and fitness is concerned. In London and other areas of the UK people with disabilities can access sports almost every day of the week in order to improve their core fitness and quality of life by retaining their independence for longer, and this is where he started something new, fresh and exciting by setting up a small wheelchair basketball session in East Brighton that was open to all players regardless of a team they played for, this led to Ricky and some teammates launching the Sussex Bears Wheelchair Basketball team.​

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The Sussex Bears launched a wheelchair team last season winning the 3rd division South East and gained promotion to the 2nd division south… however during this season they have doubled the number of players and can enter a second team in the 4th division known as the development league.

 Ricky Perrin – Team Manger followed up by saying “Several brand new players like Andy will get a brand new set of vests when the development league starts in April at the Sir Robert Woodard Academy, plus it is fantastic to see some sponsorship and promotion going to the grass roots of the sport… it was great to pop down here today and we even managed to get Jayne from One Stop to have a go in a sports wheelchair”

Playing wheelchair basketball can have life changing effects to those that play it, the physical and mental health benefits are incredible and we are linking ourselves up with our local universities, our hospitals and schools to bring this sport to many people as we can… we have both long and short term goals in place and every single penny we get in either from sponsorship or from funding is spent developing this new dedicated pathway.

The next 18 months we will continue to build the team and develop the players that join us, being competitive on the court is vital as that drives the passion in the players to be faster, fitter and to learn more skills and be part of a team with shared vision and goals… 

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A few months ago Ricky got in touch with Birchwood Group, after hearing one of our local adverts on the radio in regards to Motability and the message we were putting across, he thought that together as a partnership we could change the way we convey the message and also educate both ourselves as a company and the general public through social media, the press and dealing with customers in all aspects to fully understand what Motability is and what it really means to be in these situations.

We were lucky enough to be invited by Ricky himself to experience life from his eyes and staff from all across our Birchwood sites including in Washington and Azur headed over for what ended up being an incredible team building night and getting the chance to play Wheelchair Basketball and ended with the result of a 6-6 scoring...

Bring on the rematch and the wonderful opportunities we are sure this will bring with it.