“There are no streets you have to cross. It’s a super, super safe community. You never had to worry. So like, my parents were super comfortable letting me go out and about and knock on my friends’ doors or go to the playgrounds. And everybody is so close; everybody knows each other here, so it’s this like, really strong, tight-knit community. Which is very, very awesome. And they have been super helpful. When I first got injured, everybody came together and was so supportive, and that was beautiful to see…a lot of freedom, I would say it gave me. A lot of freedom,” Liv Benedetto summed up her Roxbury upbringing to me on Tuesday evening.
Liv is radiant. Her freckled face, framed by blonde curls, had a near-permanent smile that crinkled her eyes nearly shut. We met in her backyard in Roxbury, surrounded by typical backyard decor–a few potted plants, a hand-painted wooden flag, a surfboard. Liv just came home from Clemson on the heels of her first year as a Division I wheelchair tennis athlete.
“I really liked my first year; I can’t wait to go back to school, honestly. I played tennis, so that was really cool. Um, yeah…” she thought back on her year, “A lot of great people I met, and a lot of growth over the year for sure.”
She elaborated, “I think that a lot of the time, in the past five years since being a wheelchair user, I’ve kind of like, put myself in this safety bubble. A lot of my teammates were very encouraging for me to get out of my shell. When I went to school, I couldn’t even get into a car on my own, but now I can get into a pickup truck. They were very adamant about me trying new things, like I had this wheel on the back of my chair that was like 12 pounds. I couldn’t even lift it up on my own when I got to school. So, it was very eye-opening for me to see that there’s other wheelchair users who are doing so much more than me, and they have a lot less function in their core, or even paraplegics.” It is always difficult not to compare, but Benedetto’s accomplishments cannot be understated.
“I started [playing wheelchair tennis] around my sophomore year of high school…I started gaining a lot of interest in it, and then senior year of high school is when I started taking it more seriously because I knew I wanted to go to Clemson to play wheelchair tennis for them. At first, I really, really hated it ‘cause growing up, I did a lot of gymnastics; that was like my main sport–some volleyball and basketball, but mainly gymnastics. And it was very frustrating because the people there had been going for so long, and they were so good, but it kind of brought back the competitiveness that I was missing, so that’s how I got into it. I actually just got my own custom chair recently,” Benedetto said. What she loves about tennis is the competition, the drive, the challenge. “I would say, honestly, the competitiveness, because even though it’s frustrating, it still like…makes me strive to be better in every way. It’s very physically demanding, which I do like because gymnastics was so physically demanding. So, for me to kind of get that back from a sport is really, really awesome…It’s definitely my favorite part.”
She explained some of the specifics of the sport. “So, you hold the racket with your dominant hand, and you have to put it in between here,” she said, using a water bottle to mime holding a racket between her palm and the rim of the wheel. “Then you push with just these fingers, and you hold the racket here, so you only push with these four fingers. And then you have to change your grip each time you do a backhand or a forehand. It’s pretty complicated.”
Last summer, starting college was the first time Benedetto lived away from home. “One of the biggest [challenges] was, if I fell on the ground. I didn’t know anyone; like, I couldn’t get back up. So that was super alarming to me. And I didn’t learn until probably January. I ended up making friends very early on in the year, which I was thankful for, and they’ve had to pick me up off the floor multiple times; they are like trained, which is really, really sweet.” She laughed, remembering some of the times she needed her friends to pick her up. A recent stint of physical therapy taught her the necessary skill.
I asked if she finds asking for and accepting help difficult. “Mm, I would say so, in some scenarios,” she said. “I feel like it’s kind of frustrating when there’s a set plan, like, let’s say, for example, going to the beach. Where everybody else could just go to the beach. With me, it takes a lot more planning. I kind of feel guilty in that sense…Yeah, I do find it hard to ask for help. I notice one of the biggest things I do–which is terrible on my part–but I’m like, ‘Oh, this is so hard,’ and then have somebody offer it so I don’t kind of feel bad for asking for it.”
At Clemson, Benedetto is studying to be a recreational (rec) therapist. Her own rec therapist inspires her. “My weightlifting coach, she’s a rec therapist, and she travels with us (Liv is also a competitive weightlifter). She does everything. She’s so knowledgeable, and she gets to work with people with disabilities…for sport, it’s basically like showing somebody who’s newly injured that sport can be a sense of rehabilitation, which I really, really love. And I definitely want to make a career out of adaptive sports, whether I’m just helping people learn how to get into them or whatever the case… It’s kind of just showing, like, that you can still get back into fun activities after a life-changing accident or injury.” This is something Benedetto herself had struggled with after her injury. “I had all these physical therapists telling me like, ‘Oh, you can do wheelchair basketball, you can do wheelchair tennis.’ And it was such a hard shift because also, I was thinking, ‘It’s so easy for you to say, you can do this, you can do that, when like my whole world just changed.’ But, had I seen someone in a wheelchair who was an adaptive athlete come to me and say that when I first got in it, it would have been life changing. So that’s another reason I’m super excited to be a rec therapist in the future, so that, like I know how much it would touch someone else.”
Benedetto already has plenty to be proud of. “A goal that I’ve accomplished, I’d say, is getting out of my comfort zone and trying new things. Like moving so far away. It was a terrifying thought, but I did it, and I did a whole year on my own. And it just showed like, I can do so much more…I learned how to drive, and I got my driver’s license. I just recently bought my car…I just need to get hand controls installed, and then I’ll be fully independent.”
Benedetto tells me she sees herself staying in South Carolina in her future, or at least moving somewhere warm and “somewhere I didn’t grow up.” She explains, “It’s not that Rockaway is a bad time; I absolutely love Rockaway. It’s just that I feel like I’ve outgrown it in a way. Especially going to a different state and seeing that there’s so much more out there. I definitely want to spread out, who knows?”
About her future, she adds, “I really do want to work with kids. But this summer is really busy.” She has plans to visit college friends before tennis starts up again in mid-July. She told me earlier, “My main thing is that I really, really want to have a job that I truly love more than anything else.”
Liv Benedetto is endlessly impressive.
