Rathje was a student at Downers Grove North and an athlete with two Chicago-area wheelchair basketball teams. What he longed to do was pursue those roles at the same time and in the same place.

"The things I worked hard at in life were seen as completely separate things," said Rathje, now a freshman at Illinois and a member of its men's wheelchair team. "People would always look at one or the other and not the same together.

"It means a lot to have it now. I wish it had been available to me at the high school level too."

Students with disabilities may someday get the opportunity Rathje never did. The Illinois High School Association Board of Directors has given Executive Director Dave Fry permission to study possible sponsorship of non-traditional interscholastic activities, which could include competition in everything from wheelchair basketball to fishing, rodeo, inline skating and board games.

Fry said the board has agreed only to consider a proposal but said he is excited by the possibility of attracting additional students to interscholastic activities.

"We believe that about 30 percent of kids in school are not involved in any out-of-classroom activity," he said. "We know there are all kinds of things kids like to do, so we had the idea of trying to find a way to reach them with some kind of interscholastic experience that would not necessarily place new demands on a school to start up a new sport or whatever."

Wheelchair basketball, which Fry said might be a separate entity from what he dubbed the "rec-streme" games, would not follow the traditional one-school, one-team model for IHSA activities. Few schools would have enough students eligible for wheelchair sports to field their own teams, so squads likely would be made up of male and female athletes from several schools in a particular area.

What's important, Fry said, is that wheelchair participants still would be interscholastic athletes competing in an IHSA-sponsored activity and representing their schools.

"When the IHSA is involved, there's an automatic recognition factor that interscholastic sports gives," he said. "There's peer and public recognition associated when you're part of a school program that you just don't get elsewhere to the same extent."

That realization is what inspired Illinois men's and women's wheelchair basketball coach Michael Frogley to devise a model for interscholastic participation in his sport and approach Fry last spring about implementing it.

Frogley has experienced basketball both standing and sitting. He played high school ball as a student in Canada, then started playing wheelchair basketball in 1988, two years after he was injured in an automobile accident.

Frogley came to Illinois in 1997 to pursue a doctoral degree and coach the Illini wheelchair teams. He developed his plan for high school wheelchair basketball as a class project.

"So many of us have in our memories our own high school athletic experience and what it did to benefit us," said the 32-year-old Frogley, coach of the Canadian men's team that won a gold medal in the Paralympics in October in Sydney. "Now a population may see this same benefit where it didn't before."

Frogley said he knows of no place in the country that offers wheelchair basketball as a true interscholastic sport, let alone on a statewide basis.

"That's what is so novel about this," he said. "It would basically be run the same as any other high school sport. We would recognize these kids as student-athletes, not as kids with disabilities."

Corey Bell, a program specialist with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago's Wirtz Sports Program, said opportunities in junior, or youth, division wheelchair basketball in the Chicago area are limited mostly to a handful of teams sponsored by special recreation associations.

"There are a lot of kids out there who just aren't getting the opportunity to play," he said. "It's one of those things that in my opinion, if you have it [players] will come, especially in schools."

Fry said the IHSA plans to send a questionnaire to its 755 member schools this month to find out the number and location of students eligible to play wheelchair basketball. According to Illinois State Board of Education figures, about 3,300 high school students are classified as having physical impairments, though some students listed as having other health impairments also might qualify to play.

So, too, would an unknown number of students with what Frogley called "invisible" disabilities. These are students who normally don't use wheelchairs but have a condition--perhaps a below-the-knee amputation or a leg-length discrepancy--that prevents them from playing regular basketball.

"A lot of people like that think, `I don't push around a wheelchair every day so wheelchair basketball is not for me,'" Frogley said. "But it's the perfect sport for them.

"Wheelchair basketball is a sport where it just so happens the piece of equipment you use to play is a wheelchair. A person with a prosthetic leg can hop in and play."

If he plays for his high school, that student may benefit in ways extending beyond fun and exercise. Frogley believes that interscholastic wheelchair athletes would gain in self-esteem and change attitudes about teenagers with disabilities.

"Now these kids would be recognized by their peers for what they can do on the basketball court and in the classroom, not for pushing a wheelchair around or walking on crutches," he said. "People would be taught to push aside those things as superficial and judge these kids by their character and ability."

That could be vitally important to students with disabilities because peer support is crucial during late adolescence, said Dr. Mary Jo Palmieri, a pediatric psychologist with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

"Wheelchair sports can provide a means for experiencing personal camaraderie, for building relationships with one's peers," she said. "It's also an opportunity to be viewed as competent among your peers, having a sense of purpose and fitting in.

"Something that can't be emphasized enough is while so much support comes from one's family--and that's wonderful--what teenagers crave is peer support."

Rathje craved simply to play basketball, a sport he loved since he was a child but couldn't participate in because cerebral palsy confined him to a wheelchair.

When he was 9, he began participating in wheelchair track. At age 12, he began playing with the Junior Wheelchair Bulls, a west suburban wheelchair basketball team that shot at baskets 8 1/2 feet from the floor, a height used by teams with inexperienced or more severely disabled players.

As a sophomore, Rathje joined the team at Spalding High School, a Chicago public school about one-fourth of whose students have orthopedic impairments. The team receives part of its funding from the Rehabilitation Institute, so it accepts players from other Chicago schools and other school districts.

Rathje joined the RIC-Spalding Bulldogs in part to prepare to play college wheelchair basketball. The team uses 10-foot baskets and competes in the National Wheelchair Basketball Association's youth division, which consists of about 30 teams scattered throughout the country.

Many of the Bulldogs' games were in out-of-state weekend tournaments, which made Rathje pay a price for his ambition.

"We'd go to Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin . . . and I might have to take off school for it," said Rathje, who also was a manager on the Downers North boys basketball team. "We'd play four or five games in a weekend. I'd come back exhausted, and people wouldn't understand why."

Rathje practiced once a week with RIC-Spalding, getting a ride after school from Downers Grove to a near West Side park district gym from his mother, Kathy. He believes that interscholastic wheelchair basketball would offer students a more traditional and rewarding athletic experience, even if teams did represent more than one school.

"You'd have a more regular life with your sports," he said. "You'd go to school and go have a game and be back in school the next day like everybody else, and not have to go through the extra steps of all the traveling.

"And you'd be part of the high school atmosphere, combining athletics and academics. It's kind of a dream."

Whether that dream will become a reality, and if so to what extent, is far from clear. Fry said the IHSA would need to find sources of financial support, including sponsorships, and availability of facilities could pose a problem.

But the IHSA and the University of Illinois' Division of Rehabilitation-Education Services, which administers the Illini wheelchair teams, hope to conduct a camp in June in Champaign to introduce potential players, coaches and officials to wheelchair basketball.

Fry said he would love to see a state wheelchair tournament run in conjunction with the March Madness Experience that accompanies the Class A and AA boys basketball tournaments.

"But that's a long way down the road," he said. "This is very much an idea in its infancy."

Frogley is eager to get rolling. Wheelchair basketball, he said, helped him rediscover skills he had stopped using after his accident, and he wants that benefit available to others.

"There are so many kids I've run into that didn't realize there was a sport they could play," he said. "When they get involved it opens up a whole side of themselves they had ignored to that point, and there's just an explosion of potential and possibilities they see, literally an explosion of dreams.

"There's nothing like seeing kids realize their dreams, and this could be the beginning of that realization."