WHEEL MEN YOUNG QUADRIPLEGIC COMFORTED ... BY RUGBY.

Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY 

Turns out the kid's a natural.

In the first wheelchair rugby tournament Mike DeYoung played in last year, he was named most valuable player.

A few weeks later, the coach of the USA quadriplegic wheelchair team - competing in the World Wheelchair Games in Rio de Janeiro later this year - called to see if DeYoung wanted to play on the team.

The Chaminade High School grad said sure, joining many of the country's best wheelchair rugby players featured in the documentary ``Murderball,'' which chronicles the drive and tenacity of wheelchair athletes playing a very physical sport.

MVP and Team USA - not bad for a kid who only months earlier was lying in bed at his parents' Chatsworth home feeling depressed and sorry for himself. Thinking his life - at least his sports life - was over.

Of course, it wasn't. Not even close. It had just begun.

``The first time I saw Mike play, I knew he was going to be good,'' says Mike Doom, coach of the Northridge Knights, a wheelchair rugby team sponsored by the therapeutic recreation department at Northridge Hospital Medical Center.

``For a new player to be chosen MVP his first time out, and then be chosen by our USA team to play in a world tournament equivalent to the Olympic Games for wheelchair athletes, is nothing short of incredible.

``It goes to his drive,'' Doom says. ``There's no quit in this kid.''

It's DeYoung's strongest point, and his weakest. He just didn't know when to quit - like four years ago, when he should have.

``A group of my friends and I went up to snowboard in Big Bear, but the lift tickets were sold out,'' DeYoung recalls. ``We pulled off to the side of the road and decided to make our own jumps.

``I was showing off and tried to do a back flip. I broke my neck. They had to airlift me to Loma Linda Hospital.''

DeYoung woke up in the intensive care unit - a 19-year-old quadriplegic with severely limited movement in his upper body. After a series of hospital stays and operations, he was sent to Northridge Hospital Medical Center to begin his physical therapy and rehabilitation.

He was like a lot of the new quads who come to this first-rate rehab center and try to pick up the pieces of their broken lives, says Emily Kline, supervisor of recreation therapists at the hospital.

Yes, like a lot of the new quads: scared and depressed.

DeYoung had a great support group behind him, with his parents, Lon and Andrea; his sister, Kelly; and girlfriend, Kristen Richardson. But now it was time to move forward on his own, in that wheelchair, to see where life was going to take him.

Kline introduced him to some of the veteran quads playing wheelchair sports, then told the kid to make a choice: basketball, football, hockey or quad rugby - the hospital had wheelchair teams in all of them.

``I thought sports was over for me, but I was wrong,'' DeYoung said Thursday night as he readied for another practice with the Knights.

``I had never played rugby before, but I came out to a few practices and was hooked. It's made a huge difference in my life.''

It's hard for people to understand why these men who have suffered a paralyzing spinal cord injury would want to play a violent, contact sport like rugby in their wheelchairs, Doom says.

The answer is simple. It makes them feel alive, even whole, again.

``Many of these guys feel they don't have anything left but sitting in that chair all the time. Coming out and playing sports changes that.

``It feels good to ram that wheelchair into each other and have a chance to take out all that frustration built up inside. They don't have to worry. They can't get any more hurt than they already are.''

True, the hitting and competition is therapeutic, but it goes deeper than that, DeYoung says.

It goes to hopefully becoming a role model for other young men and women who have suffered spinal cord injuries, showing them with action, not just words, that no matter how scared and depressed you get, you never quit on life.

Because it has a way of surprising you.

The MVP trophy in DeYoung's room, and a chance to play for Team USA in the World Wheelchair Games in Brazil, prove that.

For more information on wheelchair athletics, go to dailynews.com

Dennis McCarthy, [phone]

dennis.mccarthy(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Mike DeYoung, 23, center, struggled against a spinal cord injury four years ago to become a player on the Northridge Knights wheelchair rugby team, which is featured in a new documentary, ``Murderball.''

(2) Mike DeYoung, at a practice with his Northridge Knights teammates, will be on Team USA later this year at the World Wheelchair Games in Rio de Janeiro.

David Sprague/Staff Photographer