HARTFORD, Conn. -- Karen Smith was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1990. The competitive skier recalled the doctor coming in and telling her she might not be able to walk anymore.

“I said to him, ‘Well, how am I going to ski?’” Smith said. “He said, ‘I just told you you might not walk, did you hear that?’ I said, ‘I did, but how the hell am I going to ski? That was way more important to me.

“I didn’t know anything about adaptive sports. I said, ‘You don’t know my life, I need to know what I’m going to do for skiing.’”

Smith, now 73, of East Haven, Connecticut, eventually learned that there was someone who had started an adaptive sports program at Gaylord Hospital in Wallingford. It was Ken Murphy, who was running a golf program at the hospital. She called him and they talked about adaptive skiing.

That was the beginning of Smith’s involvement with the Gaylord Sports Association, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. When Murphy, who died in 2016, started the program, there were six sports – golf, archery, tennis, sailing, tai chi and ski trips to mountains that offered adaptive skiing.

Now there are 17 sports offered and last year, over 250 people participated in Gaylord programs. The programs are open to anyone in the community over 16 and range from rock climbing to wheelchair rugby to sled hockey.

Smith got to ski and mountain bike but it was sled hockey, in which players use sleds to move around, that she gravitated toward. After playing goalie on the team for many years, she is now the team’s manager. Four members of the Gaylord team competed in the women’s sled hockey world championships recently and won the gold medal.

Along the way, Smith helped nudge the people running the programs at Gaylord to add more sports and also served as an ambassador, urging people who were doing rehabilitation at the hospital and others to join. Early on, the program was not its own entity and was run by the people in the therapeutic recreation department.

“It was very small,” Smith said. “They could only do so much. I kept bugging them, ‘Look at this sport, look at that sport.’

“The programs kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, probably because of some of the pain-in-the-necks like me that were pushing them.”

In 2005, the sports association became its own entity and Todd Munn was named as director and the program began to expand. Katie Joly took over as the program manager in 2013.

“It started with Ken Murphy. He started to offer golf clinics and archery clinics and some ski trips to patients at Gaylord as part of their therapeutic recreation services to help in their recovery,” Joly said. “He saw the importance that sports and recreation could have in someone’s recovery.

“Since I took on the role, I’ve been able to pretty significantly expand the sports offerings as well as how many people we serve. We’ve doubled the number over the last 10 years.”

Over 250 adaptive sports opportunities are offered every year, from classes to clinics to tournaments and clubs and there are also sports offerings for veterans such as fishing and golf. Most are free of charge and the adaptive equipment and coaching is provided.

Frank Selva, a golf pro at Sleeping Giant Golf Course who lives in Bethany, has been coaching golf and helping golfers at Gaylord since he met Murphy in the early ’90s.

“I said the biggest thing was to get people interested in it and to tell people no matter what the problem might be, if they had a stroke or lost a limb, that there were still ways to go out and enjoy the game,” said Selva, who was the pro at Race Brook Country Club in Orange at the time. “We got started doing a little clinic at the golf course. We did quite a bit of work with veterans.

“We got some help from the PGA Foundation, got some grant money to help Gaylord develop a program with clubs, we set up an area that people could come to and practice and hit balls. Through the years it’s grown.”

Smith tried golf, but it was too slow for her. She preferred mountain biking. After she started to play sled hockey with an organization outside of Gaylord, she wanted to continue when the people running the program were retiring. So she approached Gaylord and asked if they could help with the sled hockey program.

“They took us on,” Smith said. “Now we are one of their top teams. We’ve had incredible success with the sled hockey team.”

Smith was the starting goalie for nine years on the women’s national team before she had to retire from competition because of shoulder issues.

Tara McNeil of West Hartford is a bilateral below-knee amputee who never played sports. She learned about Gaylord Sports Association after her first amputation in 2014 when she attended an amputee support group meeting at the hospital.

Now she rock climbs, water skis, bikes, snowboards and has participated in archery and a triathlon.

“I never considered I’d be able to do anything athletic,” McNeil said. “It was a whole new community, a new world of people.

“It’s been probably more helpful for my mental health, but it’s helped my physical health as well.”

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