Scout Bassett found a home in sports

Scout Bassett is all about accessibility in sports, whether she is playing them, commentating on them, or advocating for participation in them.

Scout Bassett, 35, competed in the Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, where she came in fifth in the 100m and 10th in the long jump. She is the world record holder in the 400m in the T42 category (which is for above-the-knee amputees or those with a comparable disability), and the American record holder in the 100m and the 200m.

Bassett lost her right leg in a chemical fire when she was a newborn in China and was subsequently abandoned. She lived in an orphanage in Nanjing until she was 7 when an American family adopted her. She was raised in Michigan, where sports became her passion.

“I have so many identities, and it all found a home in sports,” Bassett said in an interview last month. As an adoptee, a minority, and a girl with a disability, she has said she never felt completely comfortable in her new town or schools, which were majority white, or even within her family — her parents are white, and her two siblings were also adopted from China. “I think it really helped me transcend a lot of the cultural and social barriers I was dealing with. You don’t have to all speak the same language or look the same way to play a sport.”

Bassett played soccer, basketball, softball, tennis, and golf as a child. She received her first prosthetic running leg at 13 through the Challenged Athlete Foundation and began competing in track and field. She attended UCLA on a full scholarship, and it was there where she was approached about Paralympic competition. She competed in triathlons, then switched to track and field events before the Rio Games. After Rio, she won bronze medals in the 100m and long jump at the 2017 World Para Athletics Championships in London and a gold in the long jump at the 2019 Parapan American Games in Lima.

Scout Bassett is now focused on promoting accessibility and promoting participation

Bassett partnered with Always this year in a campaign called #KeepHerPlaying, geared towards keeping girls in sports through puberty. According to Always, nearly 50 percent of girls stop playing sports around this time, a fifth of those because they don’t feel good about themselves. Bassett wants to help girls see their changing bodies not as barriers but as something that ultimately makes them stronger, both on and off the playing field and into adulthood.

“The beauty of sports is that there’s challenges, right?” she said. “There’s setbacks, there’s disappointments, perhaps even failures. When a young girl is able to learn how to deal with those, how to overcome them and to move past them, she’s going to be able to take those skills and apply them in her life after sports.”

In other words, keep sports accessible to girls as they become women, and you keep more options accessible to those women. “We’ve seen that girls who play sports through puberty go on to be successful leaders and make valuable contributions to their communities,” Bassett said.

As a track and field commentator for NBC during the Paralympics in Tokyo earlier this month, Bassett said she wanted to make the Paralympics themselves more accessible to a broader audience. “​​For so many people, this is really going to be the first time they’re going to be able to see the Paralympics,” she said. For her, that meant a great deal of preparation. “The Paralympics, when you watch it, is quite different than watching the Olympics,” she said. “And a lot of people, they’re not going to know what they’re watching, right? The classifications, the different disabilities, how it affects the event or the sport they’re in.”

She said she intended to create a viewer-friendly but educational experience that made people want to tell their friends to watch, too. “I firmly believe that if people tune in, they’re going to be so moved and wowed by the performances, the athletes. It’s just a really important message that we’re going to be sending,” she said.

Bassett said that, as the only woman on the broadcast, she wanted to inspire young girls watching to keep going in sports, or to give them playing a sport a shot for the first time. “The Paralympics are important to girls with disabilities,” she said, “to help them overcome the many struggles and challenges that they are going through.”

Why We Play features stories about the power of sports to bring us together, overcome obstacles, make positive change and reach everyone. Read more here.