alumniPROFILE
SAU Therapists Help Disabled Skiers, Too
“I saw the deficits patients had when they started therapy and saw them progress and become more independent and I just loved that,” said Braet, who is now an occupational therapist at Hope Creek Care Center in East Moline, Ill. “I just love that it makes a difference.” Despite maintaining a 20-hour-per-week work schedule, Braet attacked college with her standard dose of relentlessness. It wasn’t an easy path as a full-time student in her 30s, but Braet said she had the advantage of pursuing her degree in an MOT program where the teachers’ motivational levels matched her own. “They want you to succeed,” she said of a program that boasts a 100 percent job placement rate. “Once I was able to accomplish getting my degree, I just felt like ‘OK, what’s next?’ I have always got to have something in the works.” Before she submitted her proposal for an adaptive rowing program to Mike Wennekemp, the Y’s executive director, Braet needed to write a business plan. And, as it happened, she knew how. “The only time I had ever written a business plan was in graduate school,” Braet noted. “At the time, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, when am I ever going to use this?’’’ Her plan, of course, was approved last year, and Braet, adaptive rowing coach Jessica Brady and rowing club equipment
expert Paul Herrington spent the spring outfitting and testing a wider, more stable adaptive hull at the Moline-based boat house. On June 2, adaptive rowers Bob Jaurez, Juli Varble, John Sparks and Brent Herman put their oars in the Mississippi for the first time, but definitely not the last. If all goes according to plan, the QC group will be joined by adaptive rowers from across the Midwest at the annual Quad Cities Rowing Regatta in October. That would amount to Braet’s latest finish line and Dave Weaver, rowing director for the QC club, won’t be surprised to see it crossed. “Passion, extreme passion,” he said in describing Braet’s key strength. “Without her, this program would never be where it is.” —Craig DeVrieze
Tanya Braet’s interest in adapting rowing started with adaptive water skiing. Braet was among the first student volunteers who helped MOT Professor Phyllis Wenthe ’97 MEd, PhD, with Access to Waves, an adaptive water skiing clinic conducted annually by the Genesis Therapeutic Recreation Department and the Backwater Gamblers water skiing club. “Just to see people with disabilities be able to get out of their chairs and into the water, I thought it was pretty amazing,” Braet said of the seven-year-old program. Scheduled this year for Aug. 18 on the Rock River, Access to Waves has grown through the annual volunteer participation of Wenthe, MOT Instructor Jon Turnquist ’92, ’10 MOL, and as many as 20 St. Ambrose MOT students. Wenthe and the students help wheelchair-bound athletes transfer from their wheelchairs into chairequipped skis. Turnquist helps construct those skis and ensures they fit properly, said Glen Sancken, himself a paraplegic and the Genesis director of therapeutic recreation. “Phyllis and Jon are just so instrumental for our program,” Sancken said. “I don’t even know if it would exist without those two.”
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