Rosenbaum Scholarship Helps ODU Student Excel

A foundation scholarship is helping athlete Eric Ingram excel at Old Dominion University and in life.

The pass went nearly the entire court to a wide-open opponent. It looked like a certain score for the other team. Then Eric Ingram, the guy they call “The Flea,” took off. Like Hampton Roads sports legends Allen Iverson and Percy Harvin, Eric has that extra gear that makes everyone else seem stuck in mud.

Ingram skittered across the gap and slammed into his much larger opponent, deftly picking the point of impact. The opposing ball carrier instantly went from runaway to pointing the wrong way. This was just practice. But over and over again, Ingram closed gaps, made impossible pivots and either blocked a goal or scored one himself. There’s just no quit in the 20-year-old quadriplegic rugby star.

Born with a rare genetic disorder called Freeman-Sheldon syndrome that has led to more than a dozen surgeries, Ingram applies the same persistence he shows in wheelchair rugby to his studies at Old Dominion University. He attends ODU with help from a scholarship from the Edwin J. Rosenbaum Fund started at the Hampton Roads Community Foundation in 1985 by a bequest from Rosenbaum’s estate. Rosenbaum, a Portsmouth native who lived for years in Norfolk before his death in 1977, requested that his scholarship help deserving Jewish students to pay for college. In the past 25 years the Rosenbaum scholarship has provided $255,400 to 28 college students – most, like Ingram , for four years of study.

Ingram fits the description of the perfect Rosenbaum candidate. He excelled at Norfolk’s Granby High, loading up on AP math and science classes while taking leadership roles in the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization and the Aleph Zadek Aleph Jewish fraternity. The $2,000-a-year scholarship helps since Ingram and his older brother have overlapped at ODU. The cost of Ingram’s wheelchairs and medical expenses made it difficult for his family to save for college.

Ingram is a business major planning to graduate in 2012. He maintains a 3.92 GPA at ODU despite the travel that goes with being a member of two elite rugby teams. When Ingram’s small size and weak upper body made it hard to play wheelchair basketball, he switched at age 15 to quad rugby, the full-contact sport affectionately known as “murderball. ” It is now a life passion for Ingram, whose on-court nickname is “The Flea” because he is “light, agile and annoying.”

Ingram is a founder and captain of the East Coast Cripplers, Virginia’s only quad rugby team, which qualified for the nationals this year. For him rugby gives him a break from being “the guy in the wheelchair. On the rugby court everyone is equal and you are an athlete.”

Ingram is also a member of the national quad rugby developmental team. He trains weekly with teammates and twice a week on his own at the ODU recreation center where he races around a track for a mile as fast as he can and then carries a 10-pound weight during a moderate three-mile stint. He attends Sigma Pi fraternity meetings once a week and managed the recent campaign of Ryan Cooper, who ran for mayor of Norfolk. He does all this while handling a full load of classes at ODU.

Ingram would love to find a sports-related job some day. But right now he’s concentrating on athletics. His team is ranked 16th in the nation, and he is training for the 2012 summer Paralympic games in London, which will immediately follow the Olympics.

“I’m light years ahead of where I was last year at this time,” he says. “I’m building endurance, building speed, building skills.” Ingram is determined to have no what- ifs in life. “The time to be an elite athlete only happens during a certain span in your life,” he says.

Learn more about www.eastcoastcripplers.com

Photo and video courtesy of Preston Gannaway and The Virginian-Pilot.