WICHITA – Grant Pierce has long been a guy who is going places.
 
As an adaptive sports athlete and one of the top youth wheelchair racers in the country, Pierce has traveled across the United States to compete in national and international events.
 
At the Kansas high school level, he has helped to usher in a new era of wheelchair racing at the State Outdoor Track and Field Championships by winning 100-meter and 400-meter dash titles each of the past two years.
 
And in November, the 17-year-old Pierce, a senior at Wichita’s Northeast Magnet High School, will travel to Vila Real de San Antonio, Portugal, to represent the United States in the International Wheelchair and Amputee Sports World Games.
 
“It’s just something you dream of as an athlete,” said Pierce, one of 30 U.S. athletes ages 13 to 39 who will be among approximately 500 IWAS Games competitors from around the world. “It’s always in the back of your mind. You see all the athletes on TV representing Team USA and you’re like, ‘I want to be one of them. I want to do that.’
 
“To finally be able to get to do that, it’s something I’m really proud of.”
 
Pierce, the CapFed® True Blue® Student of the Week, applied for his spot and met criteria that included a minimum of two years competing at the national level. His collection of qualifying times will allow him to compete in five IWAS Games events ranging from the 100 to 1,500 meters.

 
It’s the latest goal Pierce has achieved while maintaining a 4.2 weighted grade-point average at Northeast with his sights set on becoming a reconstructive surgeon.
 
“We’ve been asked if there’s anything Grant doesn’t do well and our little joke is ‘Walking,’” said Kary Pierce, whose son was born with Bockenheimer’s syndrome, a degenerative condition in which the vascular cells in his lower left quadrant mutated during his development in utero. “He just has this personality where you can tell me I can’t do something, and I’m going to do it 20 times to prove you wrong. I think that’s what’s taken him this far in life.”
 
Despite the condition, which causes blood pooling and varicose veins in Pierce’s left leg, he was able to play baseball, basketball and soccer at an early age. But when he was 7, Pierce broke his femur playing soccer, an injury that exacerbated his condition.
 
Pierce spent a month in the hospital and another two months in a full body cast. The injury left him in a wheelchair.
 
“There was just something missing from being bedridden and wheelchair bound,” Pierce said. “I just felt this sort of emptiness.”
 
In 2014, a physical therapist who worked with Pierce steered him to the Challenge Games, an annual competition in Derby for adults and children with disabilities or visual impairment. The re-introduction to sports improved Pierce’s outlook.
 
Another competition, the University of Central Oklahoma Endeavor Games in Edmond, was also a big difference maker.
 
“That’s an annual event with adaptive swimming and powerlifting, tennis, basketball and track,” Kary Pierce said. “We took him to it and he just lit up. With his disability, he often gets lumped in with people with cognitive issues, but there he saw, ‘I’m like everybody else. My leg just doesn’t work.’
 
“There were a lot of ex-military competitors, amputees. I remember Grant seeing a gentleman in a wheelchair who transferred to a motorcycle, and he said, ‘How do I be like that?’ I told him, ‘You can do and be anything you want to be.’ I just broke down. He finally found people that looked like him and saw it for what it was.”
 
Pierce competes in wheelchair basketball and tennis, and was part of a team that participated in the National Wheelchair Basketball Association national tournament last spring in Wichita. He has set national youth records in shot put, discus and javelin in his wheelchair classification in addition to several marks in track.
 
Pierce’s arrival on the high school track scene coincided with the Kansas State High School Activities Association executive board’s approval to add events for wheelchair-bound athletes at the state track meet in January 2020. His mother, who serves on the board for the non-profit organization Wichita Adaptive Sports, and now-retired USD 259 athletic director J. Means worked for years with KSHSAA to bring wheelchair track to that stage.
 
“Getting people with disabilities to realize that they have options and outlets for sports, especially when they’re in high school, it’s a huge deal,” Pierce said. “To do it at the state level, it’s not just big athletics-wise, but socially.”
 
After the pandemic wiped out the initial opportunity for state wheelchair competition, Pierce’s sophomore season was jeopardized by health setbacks. He underwent a surgical procedure to remove blood clots and excess veins in his leg at Boston’s Vascular Anomalies Clinic in the summer of 2020. It was one of 24 surgeries Pierce has experienced in his lifetime.
 
When he returned home, the surgical incision opened, requiring another procedure. The wound-care issues persisted throughout the fall and through the winter holiday season, when Pierce was hospitalized multiple times with complications.
 
“I figured I wasn’t going to be able to compete that following season, but that February, things got a lot better,” Pierce said. “It had felt like how I felt after I fractured my femur. It was like something integral to me had been taken away and there wasn’t anything I could about it.
 
“There’s nothing I love more than doing sports and being competitive. It’s what I strive for, it’s what I live for. It’s one of those things where you were just hoping it gets better. You don’t know when, you don’t know if. It was really concerning, but it was an unreal feeling to actually get back into it.”
 
Pierce became the first USD 259 middle school student to compete in track when he attended Mayberry Cultural and Fine Arts Magnet Middle School. In high school, he has been part of the Wichita Heights track team through a cooperative agreement with Northeast and trains under Brandon McMillen, a Heights assistant who works with distance racers.
 
“A lot of the first few times working together was us teaching each other,” Pierce said. “He obviously knows a lot about coaching and about high school track, and I know a lot about mechanics and working with the wheelchairs in general.
 
“We’ve brought those two worlds together. He’s been such a great advocate and a great coach for me, and he’s been so willing to just immerse himself in the sport and do everything he can to make me a better athlete.”
 
McMillen, the Falcons cross country coach, had no experience working with an adaptive sports athlete. He started to research methods and best workouts after quickly realizing Pierce’s unique potential. He also works to integrate Pierce into competition with able-bodied competitors.
 
“I didn’t know much about anything at the start, really,” McMillen said. “I was told he could do longer workouts because the way his body recovers is different. It’s kind of become like a new pastime for me. I’ve reached out and talked to coaches who have really helped. What I’ve learned is there are really phenomenal athletes in wheelchairs.
 
“Grant is definitely a unicorn. If I’ve ever had a question about something related to wheelchair racing, he knows it. He’s coached me on how to be a better coach.”
 
Wheelchair racers require mechanical skills to set the compensators on their three-wheeled chairs, a mechanism that allows them to properly navigate the curves and straightaways. Pierce said wheelchair racing against fellow chair competitors features drafting techniques similar to those used by able-bodied racers.
 
When Pierce races in heats against able-bodied runners, pacing becomes more important, particularly in windy conditions. While there’s a wide variance of times between faster able-bodied competitors and wheelchair racers in short sprints, the pendulum shifts around the 600- and 700-meter mark, Pierce says.
 
Pierce completed his first high school track season as one of six boys wheelchair competitors in two classes at Wichita’s Cessna Stadium. He won the 100 in 16.29 seconds and the 400 in 1:03.99.
 
At the 2022 state track meet, wheelchair racers competed in one class. Pierce defeated a full heat of eight racers in the 100 in 16.00, and repeated as the 400 winner in 56.42. The meet also featured two girls wheelchair racers, Bishop Carroll’s Jade Link and Goddard Eisenhower’s Sophia Beers.
 
“Seeing more people do it at state, it’s just a good sign that adaptive sports will continue at the high school level,” Pierce said. “I never want it to be that once I’m gone, then that’s the history of wheelchair racing in high school. It’s for everyone who needs to be able to have that outlet to compete.”
 
Pierce’s summer circuit took him to Phoenix for his third Desert Challenge Games, where wheelchair athletes from more than 20 countries competed, and ended in Denver, where he earned four second-place finishes and two thirds competing in the under-20 age division at the Move United Junior Nationals.
 
Pierce was runner-up in the 100 (17.10), 200 (30.26), 1,500 (4:05.23) and 5,000 (15:43.74). He took third in the 400 (58.84) and 800 (2:00.89).
 
There’s camaraderie and a willingness to help one another at these events, Pierce said, because of the limited number of competitors. It’s that spirit that makes him want to help others in his professional career. At Northeast, that type of cooperation has enabled Pierce to excel amid the challenges of dealing with his health condition.
 
“The staff at the school has been great at being able to provide for me and educate me in a sort of outside way if I’m ever not here,” said Pierce, who was inducted into the school’s National Honor Society this week. “I’m taking two (advanced placement) classes, calculus and biology, and pre-med classes. There’s just a lot of communication with me and my teachers.”
 
Pierce is weighing college options, and has spent time with paralympic coaches and athletes at the University of Illinois. He plans to visit Arizona and others before making his choice.
 
An immediate priority, however, is Portugal, where Pierce hopes to relish an experience that could eventually lead to an ultimate goal – the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris.
 
“I’ve told a lot of people Grant’s life has been a roller-coaster ride,” Kary Pierce said. “The highs have been really high and the lows have been really low. He’s had to be Life Watched a few times with severe bleeding issues.
 
“But the highs as a para racer have been really high for him. He’s met so many people. I could send him to any state, and he would find somebody he knows and they would help him and he would help them. I’ve been asked would you change any of it? I don’t know that I would. The people we’ve met and the community we have, we never would have had that if this hadn’t happened. The sky really is the limit for him.”