How adaptive sports opened up disabled Navy veteran’s world

Former Navy hospital corpsman Devora Exline has attended the National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic since 2013. Over her nearly 26-year military career, she experienced traumatic brain and other debilitating injuries. Exline said adaptive sports have changed her perspective and inspired her to become a coach.

For Devora Exline, this year’s National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic in Snowmass, Colorado, could mark a full-circle moment. 

Exline started attending the clinic in 2013. During those first couple of years, she enjoyed skiing down the mountainside in a standing position despite her physical limitations.  

“And then, unfortunately, my military injuries caught up with me,” she said.

Exline served as a Navy hospital corpsman from 1985 to 2010, deploying to Kuwait during the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s and again in 2003. Over her nearly 26-year career, she sustained multiple traumatic brain injuries, including one from a detonated improvised explosive device, among other debilitating injuries.  

After the military, Exline struggled to readjust to civilian life as she navigated chronic pain and post-traumatic stress. She attended nursing school, where a fellow student who had served in the Marines recognized that Exline needed help and took her to the Vet Center. That began Exline’s journey of recovery, both physically and mentally, from the traumas of her military service.   

In 2012, she attended a Department of Veterans Affairs summer sports clinic in San Diego. The following year, she took the leap into winter sports.

When Exline was told she would no longer be able to ski standing up, she was “pretty devastated.”

“Because it’s basically saying, ‘Yeah, I can’t do what normal people do,’” she said.

But when her longtime winter sports clinic coach, David Schadle, encouraged Exline to adapt and try sit-skiing, her concepts of “normal” and “disability” shifted.

“It was great to have a coach that turned all that negative hogwash that was in my head into a positive and into having a really good time on the mountain and each year being able to advance and get better,” she said.

Exline said the positive influence of clinic coaches has been life-changing.

“One of the things that adaptive sports has really helped me with is to get back my positiveness and turning anything negative into a positive,” she said. “What do they say, ‘miracles on a mountainside’? I think that’s been the miracle for me.”

Exline has been so inspired by adaptive sports that she’s in the process of becoming a certified adaptive sports coach and has already started coaching others in fly-fishing and kayaking.

“Adaptive sports has really opened up my world,” she said.

Now, roughly 10 years after what she first saw as a setback on the slopes, Exline has been cleared to try skiing while standing again.

“It’s like coming full circle,” she said, “and I am really excited.”