Olympian athlete and disability rights advocate Susie Grimes has been an international and national women’s wheelchair basketball competitor and coach. In addition to helping the USA Women’ Wheelchair Basketball team win Olympic gold and silver medals, Susie was assistant coach for the team in 1996, in which the team won bronze.
A confirmed Buckeye with a deep love of her adopted state of Oregon, Susie was deeply involved in athletics from a young age. 
In 1978, at age 23 she fell 65-feet in a tree climbing accident, resulting in an incomplete spinal cord injury and irreparable damage to both her ankles and several broken vertebrae in her back.
The accident was life-changing for Susie, but it couldn’t have occurred at a more opportune time. The Disability Rights movement was coming of age, opening doors that had for centuries been closed to men, women and children with disabilities. A decade earlier, Susie’s accident would have meant the end of her career in sports. Instead, it marked the beginning of her rise as an international athlete.
Moving to the San Francisco Bay Area to study Physical Education with an adaptive emphasis, Susie began playing wheelchair
basketball with the Bay Area Meteorites, an NWBA team in the Women’s Division. In 1986 she earned a spot on the USA Women’s Wheelchair Basketball team which competed in England in the Stoke Mandeville Games and won silver. Susie remained a starting player on US teams for 4 more international competitions including the 1988 Paralympic Games which won gold in Seoul, Korea and silver in the 1992 Paralympics in Barcelona, Spain. The team also won gold in the 1990 Gold Cup in St. Etienne, France and silver in the1998 Gold Cup in Sydney, Australia.
As a coach and instructor with the City of Eugene, Susie organized and taught sport practices, fitness classes, and recreation workshops, for people with various disabilities, including beeper baseball, adaptive horseback riding, power soccer, quad rugby, wheelchair basketball and tandem cycling for 5 years. Her Eugene-based women’s wheelchair basketball team, the Western Grizzlies, won the NWBA Women’s Division National Championship in 1998.
Off the court, as an international disability rights advocate, Susie led cross-disability exchange programs in 15 countries including Armenia, Bosnia, China, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Germany, Costa Rica, and Bahrain. She led workshops on leadership, advocacy, microenterprise, sports program development and disability inclusion, land mine awareness, and worked with numerous foundations, U.S. Embassies and local non-governmental and government officials.
Susie was inducted into the National Wheelchair Basketball Hall of Fame in 2007, and the Oregon Disabled Sports Hall of Fame in 2008. She earned her M.A. in International Development Studies from the University of Oregon in 2012 graduating magna cum laude.
