Vincent Dallaire crosses his arms and his entire torso disappears behind them. They’re that big and he’s that small.

He knows people often look at him wondering what’s up with the young man with the huge calloused hands and long, muscular arms attached to a tiny, child-like body. He doesn’t care in the slightest.

“They’re useful,” says Dallaire, smiling and looking at his arms, which give him an astonishing six-foot-six wingspan, “super useful.”

“I can do all sorts of things.”

Right now, the 20-year-old is one of the youngest players on the Canadian men’s wheelchair basketball team, which expects to win a medal at the 2015 Parapan Am Games in Toronto this August.

Dallaire was born with a spinal malformation and his body didn’t grow into his arms so, on the hard court in his wheelchair, he looks like a small guy. Until, that is, he spins his chair on a dime, grabs a ball that his opponent thought was safely out of reach and drains a three-pointer.

“Other players don’t realize what I can do so I surprise them.”

He’s grinning now, just thinking about the satisfaction that comes with getting the better of an opponent with 100 pounds and more than a foot of height on him.

Finding a way to succeed with what life has provided is, in a nutshell, the whole point of para sport.

And that’s something that Mike Frogley, who trains Dallaire, understands better than most.

Frogley has a lot of official titles, including director of Canada’s national wheelchair basketball academy, a one-of-a-kind centre for training and innovation in Toronto. Most people just call him Frog – he likes that - and the greatest mind the game has ever seen, which he’s less keen on given his belief that teamwork is everything.

In the last six Paralympics, Canada’s men and women have won gold in wheelchair basketball six times, and picked up a silver and a bronze. No other country has had such dominance and Frogley is credited with creating the streak and, now, responsible for getting it back after a recent slide.

“We want to get to the point where every single country in the world says, ‘So, who is going to play Canada in the gold medal game?’”

But a good chunk of Canada’s success had to do with being ahead of the international curve in supporting Paralympians and a fortuitous crop of exceptional players and the country can’t rely on either of those happening again, he says.

“To get our men and women back into that cycle (of dominance) we have to look at the sport differently.”

His vision of what innovation in wheelchair basketball looks like plays out daily at the new Pan Am Sports Centre at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus. That’s where Dallaire and 20 other players train year-round and access everything from strength training and physiotherapy to sport psychology and nutrition all in one high performance hub.

It’s a world away from what happened in Frogley’s playing days on the national team from 1989 to 1992.

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“Back then, guys would go to a tryout three months before a major like the Paralympics and if they were selected then they’d start training,” he recalls. “I’ll bet half the team smoked in 1992.”

No one would get away with that these days, especially not with the new, more physically demanding, style of play that forms as much a part of Frogley’s innovation as the academy itself.

The wheelchair game is similar to standup ball with one crucial difference: no lateral movement.

“Once I get between you and the basket on the court I can, in theory, stop you for an indefinite period of time, you can’t just step around me the way you can in able-bodied basketball,” he explains.

A player with great chair-handling skills can keep an opponent from moving down the court effectively taking them out of the game. But Frogley has taken the position-is-paramount strategy one step further.

“Position is a concept based in space and time,” he says.

Instead of sticking with the common half-court game, the Canadians are pioneering an offensive style that seeks to get position early, slowing down their opponents and taking up valuable time on their shot clock.

Sounds easy. It’s not, says Dallaire.

“Now you score and you’re on chairs right away.”

And, in his case, that often means taking one of the “bigs” as he calls them. The size differential between Dallaire and many players is such that when he first moved up to the senior team two years ago he briefly wondered how he’d manage.

But, at its core, wheelchair basketball is about finding athletic advantage in apparent disadvantage. The degree to which athletes with differing functional capabilities (classified from 1 to 4.5) play together is far greater in wheelchair basketball than in most other para sports.

Three-time Olympic medallist Adam Lancia, for example, is a below the knee amputee who doesn’t even use a wheelchair in his non-sporting life. He’s classified as a 4 while Dallaire, who has far less trunk movement, is a 1.5. A team is limited to 14 points on the court at any one time so a coach can’t pick a lineup with the best and, typically, least disabled players.

“A 4, like Adam, has all these muscles he gets to use to shoot. Vincent doesn’t but he still has to shoot and make buckets,” Frogley says.

“You’ve got to figure out how to use what you’ve got to maximize your potential, which, in a way, is the story of all of us.”

In Dallaire’s case what he has, besides court smarts, are those arms.