When London, Ont. native David Willsie and his wheelchair rugby teammates won a silver medal at the 2012 London Paralympics, about seven or eight of his friends and family watched from the stands.

“Quite a few more” made it to the 2010 world championship in Vancouver.

“But we’re talking busloads coming up from London for this. Belmont. Dorchester. All those areas. It’s gonna be awesome,” Willsie said.

Wheelchair rugby, affectionately known as murderball, makes its Parapan Am debut on home soil when the Games begin Aug. 7.

To coincide with the 100-day countdown to the Parapans, CBC released coverage plans for both Games Wednesday, including three daily shows during the Pan Ams and two daily shows during the Parapans with prime-time coverage of both.

“Everything that moves, you’ll see it on one of our platforms,” Scott Russell, who will host much of CBC’s live coverage, said from the stage in the CBC Atrium.

CBC will extend coverage to online live-streams and a dedicated Android and iOS app for live coverage, highlights, and real-time results.

Though the exact day-to-day coverage has yet to be finalized, televising wheelchair rugby will be a priority, CBC spokesperson Simon Bassett said.

Invented in Winnipeg in 1976, the game pits four against four in a fast-paced amalgam of basketball, rugby and hockey.

Competing on a basketball court, players jostle for position as they try to pass a ball up the court to score by crossing a goal line at each end with the ball in hand or lap.

And the jostling can get thunderous.

“They don’t call it murderball for nothing,” Arley McNenen, spokesperson for the team, said as the clanging and clashes of wheelchairs slamming together filled the atrium.

Some members of Team Canada’s 19-person squad (the official 12-person team for the Games will be announced in the coming weeks) demonstrated the sport, coaxing onlookers, including Shad, the newly-minted host of CBC Radio show q, to try it out.

The Hershey Centre, which will be dubbed the Mississauga Sports Centre during the Games, will play host to the tournament.

Wheelchair rugby’s inclusion in the Parapan Am Games is a big moment for the sport, McNenen said.

“It’s a demonstration of the fact that wheelchair rugby is growing,” she said, adding that in past years not enough countries could field Parapan teams.

Canada is aiming for gold, which would secure a spot at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, and Willsie and his teammates hope the hometown crowd can give them the edge.

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“At all the big games, when you see the crowds for the home teams, they get that home-court advantage,” squad member Zak Madell said.

All 15 Parapan sports will be Paralympic qualifiers.

Canada will face the Americans, a rivalry famously captured in the 2005 documentary Murderball, on the last day of the round-robin tournament on Aug. 12.

Tickets have not sold out, but organizing committee CEO Saad Rafi said Wednesday’s announcement of match schedules for wheelchair rugby, as well as men’s and women’s wheelchair basketball, helps spur sales.

“We’ve been waiting to do this so we can get that interest,” Rafi said.

Until now tickets were bought by those seeking the spectacle of opening and closing ceremonies and dedicated sports fans, he said.

As more and more teams are announced and matches are scheduled, Rafi expects to see a direct correlation to a spike in ticket sales.

For Willsie, Madell and the rest of the team, the next 100 days will be filled with workouts and practices.

It takes a lot to get Willsie pumped up this far ahead of playing since he first made the national team in 1998.

But in the lead-up to these Games people have stopped him on the street to ask if he’s competing.

“I’m jacked already,” he said. “The buzz is fantastic.”