Alice Springs schoolboy Quade Stone has played basketball most of his life, loves soccer, done a bit of boxing and recently started playing rugby league.
“He’s always been a real athletic kid,” his dad Daniel Stone said.
“He just goes up against anybody and everybody. He’s very competitive, he’s just always been like that.”
Quade’s sporting talent and determination are obvious. However, because he has spastic hemiplegic cerebral palsy which affects his right side, he’s never had a genuine pathway to aim for to take his sport further.
“I’ve never held him back,” Daniel said. “I’ve only ever supported him with whatever he wanted to do and he’s always been interested in sport.
“I wanted to look at a pathway for him but the opportunity really never came along. A lot of people have seen his ability, but nothing has progressed. When I heard about this event, I thought maybe this could be that pathway.”
The event was the Alice Springs Mini Paralympics, a pilot aimed at connecting locals to Para-sport, Para-sport pathways and programs run by the Northern Territory Sports Academy. The evening beforehand, Paralympics Australia hosted a session to upskill local community sport providers, including coaches, teachers and support staff, about pathways and classification.
The program was delivered through collaboration between the Australian Sports Commission, Paralympics Australia and the Northern Territory Sports Academy, and supported by local community organisations.
Only some attendees at the Mini Paralympics had impairments that are eligible for a Paralympic pathway. Young Quade was one of those.
Quade was born in South Australia but Daniel moved with him to Alice Springs after Quade’s mother died in 2016. Daniel is Aboriginal, originally from Darwin, and his people are from North Queensland.
“I only heard about the event this morning,” Daniel said. “But I thought it would be perfect to bring Quade, so I took him out of school for the day.”
Name one 14-year-old who doesn’t love a day off. Especially, when that day could lead to the Brisbane 2032 Paralympics.
“I was going to school, but they told me that my dad rang,” Quade said. “My PE teacher knew about today and I think they were going to take me, but they said I could go with my dad.”
Quade tried all the activities and said his favourites were wheelchair basketball and the running race.
“It’s pretty hard playing basketball in a chair because I’m not used to it,” he said. “But I liked it and I think I could get good at it.”
Quade became the face of the inaugural Alice Springs Mini Paralympics. But the event was representative of a much broader paradigm shift occurring in Australian sport through the Para System Uplift, a government-backed system-wide initiative to address barriers to entry and progression in Para-sport.
Launched as part of the Australian Sports Commission’s Win Well Strategy in late 2022, the Uplift aims to support athlete development, enhance training environments, improve classification and foster collaboration between sporting bodies.
Programs such as the Alice Springs Mini Paralympics indicate the Para System Uplift will have implications that stretch far beyond the sporting field.
“With the Para Uplift there’s a big push around Brisbane 2032, but I feel like this is something that will shape the future of Para-sport for a lot longer than that,” said Jodie Zanini, Manager of Para Pathways for the NTSA Para Unit.
“Through the work we’re doing now, I’d love to see 20 athletes from the NT go to 2032 or 2028, whatever it looks like. But I’d like it to continue for way longer than that. I think that’s why it’s a ‘system uplift’. The whole system is changing.
“With the NT, especially, this is not just about sport. It’s about a complete culture change, a shift to say that anything’s possible and sport is a carriage for that. It gives people some sort of hope, some sort of ambition to try to do something different and be better for themselves.”
Zanini said she was very happy with the way the Mini Paralympics went and added that the evening beforehand was where the change agents shone.
“If you look at the people that were in the room, it was schoolteachers, physios, people who work with people with disabilities,” she said.
“If they’re showing up to an event like this, they’re keen to know more. They’re invested. It’s something that they believe in. To see them show up again for the event the next day – some of them took time off their own practices and work to come and be a part of it, which I think is just amazing.”
One was Mandy Plumb, a clinical exercise physiologist who moved from the University of New England in Armidale, NSW to work at Flinders Rural and Remote Health NT.
“I’ve been doing my national classifier training in athletics, which should be finished soon,” Plumb said. “There’s few if any classifiers in this area and then you come to an event like this – it’s just opened up my world in terms of what’s going on.
“I’m really keen to get involved with anything I can in the Northern Territory and this day has been so great for making connections, coming together to talk about how we can go forward.”
Physiotherapist Jac Bresnahan used to work Paralympic boccia medallists Dan Michel and Ash Maddern before moving to Alice Springs three years ago.
“In a town like Alice you might have a talent, you might be involved in sport, but how do you progress?” she said. “It’s sort of like, if you don’t ‘know someone who knows someone’, it often just stops there.
“That’s why events like this are amazing, because it’s highlighting all these sports that people didn’t know existed and also sports that people may have a real talent in and can work towards.”
Bresnahan said there were sport opportunities in the Alice Springs region, but they were all at community level.
“It’s just about fun, which is great,” she said. “But if you want to get onto Paralympic pathways and work towards higher level sport, it just isn’t available here.”
Why is that a problem?
“Having an elite pathway gives people with a disability the opportunity to pour their passion into sport, to work towards a big goal,” she said.
“It’s like, say, a young person who loves soccer and decides they want to play for the Matildas. They may or may not make it – very few do – but there is a pathway if they’re good enough.
“For people with a disability, it’s so often, ‘Oh well, go a have fun and throw the ball around’. But, if you want to be competitive and try to take it further, like any other person, you should have that opportunity.”
To get involved, visit the Start Line (https://www.paralympic.org.au/the-start-line/)
By: David Sygall, Paralympics Australia
Published: 19 September 2025