The 17-year-old high school senior has been playing basketball for a decade, and now, he’s representing his country on the men’s under-23 national team.
Peterson is one of just 12 athletes – and one of only three high school students – chosen for the elite team. It will be his first experience playing on the international stage.
“We go to Bogotá, Colombia, beginning of April, and then if we qualify, top two teams there, we’ll go to Brazil in June,” he said.
The Colombia competition is for national teams from across the Americas, each hoping to make it to the wheelchair basketball world championship in Brazil this summer.
And the international tournament will be Peterson’s first chance to play with his teammates, who hail from all over the country.
“It’s super fun playing with everyone that knows what they’re doing and are the top in the country,” he said.
It was a rigorous process to be selected for the national team. The tryouts were invitation-only, and Peterson had to stand out in a group of 30 top players during two rounds of tryouts at the Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs this winter.
The teen’s mother, Karen Peterson, said Gavin has defied doctors’ expectations for what he could accomplish with spina bifida, a condition in which the spinal cord doesn’t fully develop.
“He has the most extreme form of spina bifida, called myelomeningocele, where his back was open,” she said. “I think everyone seeing that, with the best of intentions, tried to kind of set the expectation for us that he wasn’t going to be able to do a lot physically.”
Doctors said the boy might never stand or walk. But then the family moved to Canada for Karen’s work when Gavin turned one, and they met a new set of doctors.
“It almost reset and allowed them to have bigger expectations,” she said. “So, the first physical therapist that saw him said, ‘We’re going to have him upright by the end of the summer.’”
She said Gavin took to sports naturally growing up. He tried everything from skiing to tennis, and then he discovered the Utah Rush, a statewide junior national team for wheelchair basketball, and something about the game clicked.
She said wheelchair basketball became a community for the whole family.
“In the stands, you’re hearing a story about a child that was in an accident, a child that has a disease that’s slowly destroying their body, another family with spina bifida, a child that was shot in a drive-by shooting,” she said. “It is the most powerful community of compassion possible.”
At the Wasatch County Recreation Center Wednesday evening, Feb. 12, a little boy around six years old, clutching a basketball, ran up to Gavin and asked for his autograph.
Karen Peterson said representation in sports makes a difference for kids growing up with disabilities.
“How do we reach more players?” she said. “How do we give more prospective athletes like Gavin the sense that there is an opportunity for them, that they can dream big, that there’s other programs that they can get involved in?”
And for Gavin, basketball has become a passion. He said he loves the pace of the game, the teammates he’s gotten to play alongside, the chance to travel and compete against teams around the country and now around the world.
The tournament in South America this spring is just the latest step in Peterson’s progression to playing at a high level.
He said he aspires to a spot on the U.S. Paralympic team in 2028. Until then, he’s taking his talents to Auburn University, where he’s committed to playing wheelchair basketball for the Tigers.
