That's wheelchair basketball, here at its birthplace at the University of Illinois. It starts early most mornings, usually in a gloomy intramural gymnasium, with the men's and women's teams mixed together under the supervision of their sole coach, Michael H. Frogley.

These are elite athletes by anyone's definition. Nine of them will compete in this fall's Paralympic Games, in Athens, which will follow the Olympic Games. Americans, Australians, and Canadians are out on the floor, and they are not loafing.

"We all start at 6:30 in the morning, and practice goes to 8:30," explains Grant Mizens, a senior, in the drawl of his native Sydney. "Two days a week we have extra work after practice, where we get a little more one-on-one work. Three days a week in the afternoon we also work out for an hour."

Then there are the bus trips. "This season coach has us going to Wisconsin, Texas, and Alabama," Mr. Mizens says.

Are he and his teammates varsity athletes? Sort of. They get scholarships, are awarded varsity letters, and have access to tutoring and academic services for athletes. They do not, however, receive the many other privileges accorded to the university's "real" varsity athletes -- dedicated practice facilities, publicity, assistant coaches, and so forth.

The wheelchair athletes are not happy about this, and legally, they may have a valid case to make for full inclusion in varsity sports, much as women did three decades ago.

"There's a big difference" between the treatment of wheelchair athletes and others, says Janna Crawford, who plays center. "There's the lack of support. We have one coach for two teams, and he's pretty stretched. The lack of uniforms, the things that really bring a team together -- I feel like I'm missing out on some of that."

Neither the public nor the university sees the wheelchair teams in quite the same light as Illinois's other varsity squads. Mr. Frogley, his athletes, and a handful of coaches and activists across the country are determined to change that.

"We have to be in people's line of sight, so that they say, 'I didn't think a kid in a wheelchair could do this,'" says Mr. Frogley, who also coaches the Canadian men's national team. "So they'll no longer think, 'Too bad, how tragic.'"

Trying to convince athletics directors that already-stretched budgets should be extended to cover sports for people with disabilities has not worked so far. But activists point out that many male athletics directors were skeptical of the legitimacy of female athletes a generation ago. And federal law gives people with disabilities the same rights and protections as women and other groups that have faced discrimination.

"Look at the reasons given for not allowing women to participate -- they can't run because it would hurt them; their bodies won't take it," says Linda Mastandrea, an alumna of the Illinois wheelchair-basketball program who is now a lawyer in Chicago. "With the whole paternalistic attitude toward a particular group, there's definitely a parallel with women's situations."

Mr. Frogley and others say that although they prefer to get universities to recognize their programs without resorting to lawsuits, they believe that federal law is on their side. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 forbid discrimination against people with disabilities, in the same language used by Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to ban discrimination against women.

Mr. Frogley argues that at least one college in each state could field a wheelchair-basketball squad.

What's more, moving supervision of wheelchair teams from disability-services offices to athletics departments would send an important signal to society as a whole, the coach says. "That's why it's so important that a university supports it," he says, "because universities have the ability to change all of society's perspective."

Numbers Game

The 2000 census found that 11 million Americans, or a little over 6 percent of the adult population, have some sort of physical disability. For wheelchair users, fitness and athleticism are especially important because cardiovascular disease and complications from diabetes are the leading causes of death in this population.

Occasionally colleges have allowed athletes with disabilities to compete as individuals on varsity teams. Aimee Mullins, who runs with artificial legs, was a sprinter for Georgetown University; she set three world records at the 1996 Paralympics. Casey Martin, despite having a degenerative circulatory disorder in his right leg, competed in golf for Stanford University in the late 1990s, using a cart after collegiate authorities waived rules requiring him to walk.

In team sports, however, there is little precedent for colleges allowing entire teams of people with disabilities to compete as varsity squads.

Among wheelchair users, men outnumber women because many more men are in accidents that damage their spinal cords. "Men tend to do stupid things," as Chuck Graham puts it. Illinois has far more players on its men's teams than on its women's roster, and he used to be one of them.

A native of Columbia, Mo., Mr. Graham lost the use of his legs in a car accident when he was 16. But he kept playing basketball, and in 1983 he passed up attending the University of Missouri on a state grant in favor of the opportunities he saw at Illinois.

"Here's the situation when I was 18," he says. "I wanted to go to journalism school, and [the state] would have paid for tuition, room, board, medical expenses, and rehab. I also applied to Illinois because of the wheelchair athletic program. I visited both campuses. Mizzou had two wheelchair-accessible dorm rooms -- not dorms, dorm rooms -- no transport, no athletics, and, outside of the classroom, no support.

"Then I go to Illinois, see the academic support, the fully accessible, dedicated transportation system for students with disabilities, and the varsity basketball team."

Indeed, Illinois's Division of Rehabilitation-Education Services is legendary. It has its roots in a special campus opened in Galesburg in 1948 to help paralyzed veterans overcome their disabilities. The program, which moved to Champaign in 1949, has always had a particular emphasis on sports, not only basketball and track but also fencing, rugby, softball, and swimming.

The basketball team's coach, Brad Hedrick, told Mr. Graham, "I need a starting point guard."

"No athlete in the history of my high school had been recruited by a Big Ten school, so that was pretty cool," he says.

Going to Illinois was tremendously expensive, Mr. Graham says, "but it was worth it to me because it literally changed my life. It made me more physically healthy, gave me a sense of self-pride, taught me all sorts of skills that helped me throughout public life as much as the journalism degree has. I wouldn't have gotten that if I went to Mizzou, and I thought it was terrible that any kid with a disability who wants to go to school to be an athlete has to make that kind of choice, and I thought, 'If ever I get the chance, I'm going to change that.'"

He did. In 1998, he was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives as a Democratic representative from Columbia, and in 2000 he was named chairman of the education-appropriations committee. He included $225,000 in the state allocation for the university to start a wheelchair-basketball program. It was to be sponsored by the athletics department, but the department never used the money, and in 2003 transferred it to the university's recreation department.

"Athletic director after athletic director, they just don't want to take it on," Mr. Graham says. "It's not that they don't respect the sport, but they have a hard time seeing disabled people as full athletes, because they live in a world where they're recruiting people who are physically perfect specimens. So when you have a physically imperfect specimen, they have a relationship problem. They don't see how that fits in with what they're doing. They're too busy running multimillion-dollar programs to want to take on the responsibility of this."

Neither Missouri athletics officials nor Illinois's athletics director, Ronald E. Guenther, returned phone calls seeking comment. But athletics directors have argued that they should have no responsibility for wheelchair sports because neither their conferences nor the National Collegiate Athletic Association recognize wheelchair sports as varsity programs.

The recreation department at Missouri will introduce the Rolling Tigers this fall. The university is about to hire a coach, and will have just over $50,000 to award in scholarships. (The varsity men's basketball team, by contrast, received $199,425 for scholarships in 2001-2, the most recent year for which figures are available, and the varsity women got $201,228.) The wheelchair team will function like a varsity sport, but without the athletics department's involvement.

"It's hard for folks to understand that this is an intercollegiate sport -- not a club sport, not intramurals, not free play or drop-in-and-shoot-some-hoops pickup," says Diane Dahlmann, director of recreation services and facilities. "I think the feeling was that [wheelchair basketball] probably had the best chance to incubate here. Whether the program remains reporting to the department of recreation services probably remains to be seen."

Parallel Laws

Title IX, which forbids sex discrimination at educational institutions receiving federal funds, was one of several laws using similar language to outlaw discrimination in general that were passed in the mid-1970s. Another was Section 504, which forbids institutions that get federal funds, including schools, colleges, and state governments, to bar qualified individuals with disabilities from any program or activity. Regulations published under the Americans With Disabilities Act add that a college receiving federal funds "that offers physical-education courses or that operates or sponsors interscholastic, club, or intramural athletics shall provide to qualified handicapped students an equal opportunity for participation in these activities." If those students are athletes, and their handicaps prevent them from participating, comparable programs must be offered for them.

Mr. Frogley believes that his teams fit the description. The National Wheelchair Basketball Association has one women's division and three men's divisions. The Illini men are perennial contenders for the national championship, and the women play Division II men's club teams during the season and then compete in the women's tournament. They have won it the past three years in a row.

Lawyers disagree on whether wheelchair athletes would have a case if they went to court. Peter Blanck, director of the University of Iowa's Law, Health Policy, and Disability Center, doesn't think so. Under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, he says, colleges and other entities have a special responsibility to make sure that they do not discriminate against "suspect classes" -- that is, women and members of minority groups -- because of the long history of discrimination endured by people in those categories. Individuals with disabilities, by contrast, are not considered a "suspect class," he says.

Other lawyers say Congress actually intended to treat people with disabilities as members of a suspect class when they passed the Americans With Disabilities Act, popularly known as the ADA. Also, Ms. Mastandrea says, Section 504 and the ADA alike require colleges to provide equivalent opportunities, both in the classroom and elsewhere, to "qualified" students with disabilities. Athletes on the Illinois wheelchair teams would definitely qualify, she says.

No athlete has ever sued a college under Section 504 or the ADA. In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Martin, the former Stanford golfer, could use a cart in professional tournaments because his doing so would not fundamentally alter the nature of the events.

A few other sports organizations have expanded to accommodate athletes with disabilities. The U.S. Olympic Committee is responsible for Paralympic sport teams and organizations under the Amateur Sports Act. At the high-school level, several states have started leagues for "adapted" sports, as they are called. With Mr. Frogley's help, the Illinois High School Association has begun sponsoring wheelchair basketball and now has 600 participants yearly. Iowa, Oregon, and a few other states sponsor exhibition wheelchair races during track meets.

Nobody knows how many college-age wheelchair athletes might be out there. Beyond the existing pool of wheelchair athletes competing in clubs and high schools, many people using wheelchairs might be attracted to the sport by the potential for college competition, Mr. Frogley says.

Complex Classifications

Ms. Crawford, the Illini center, is a doctoral student in leisure studies. She uses a lightweight chair that allows her to sit up straight, spin on a dime, and sprint on wheels canted slightly inward.

The part about sitting up straight is crucial. She has full use of her hips, and indeed does not always need a wheelchair to get around in daily life. Her hip mobility makes her a category 3 under American wheelchair-basketball rules. Teammates with less mobility are designated as 2's or 1's, based on the severity of their paraplegia.

Mr. Mizens, a 2, sits in a lower chair that tips him backward slightly, giving him more stability but less height. Players who are 1's are tipped further back, making them the shortest. However, if they are missing legs or have been paralyzed since birth, they are also the lightest and often the fastest. Under American rules, players' classifications must have a sum of 12 or less, so a team might put three 3's, a 2, and a 1 on the floor, or perhaps two 3's and three 2's.

If that sounds complicated, the rules governing other disability sports are positively arcane. Wheelchair track-and-field competitions are divided into events based on which vertebra is the highest one affected.

In conversations with players themselves, they mention another classification: "AB," which stands for "able bodied."

In other words, everybody has a place on the spectrum of ability and disability. Historically, colleges and Americans in general have celebrated AB athletes. But participating in sports is just as important, if not more so, to the lives of 1's and 2's and 3's.

"In a lot of places, people in my sport are treated as second-class citizens," Mr. Frogley says. "You can't even see that they have value. They don't exist."

In American colleges, he says, "we've developed the notion that everyone has value, but we still don't fully provide opportunities."