Iraq War vet spikes disability

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DENVER - James Stuck can tell you everything that happened on the morning of December 20, 2005, right up until the moment the truck he was riding in hit a roadside bomb.

Stuck was serving in the U.S. Army and supporting an engineering unit near Kirkuk.

"I was in the middle of the convoy and boom. The next thing I knew, I woke up in Germany," Stuck said.

He then remembers seeing a doctor standing next to his bed.

"The first question was, 'Hey do I still have my right leg?'" Stuck said. "They said, 'no' and I lost it. I thought my world was coming to an end."

It didn't.

When he got back home, the young man who grew up in Pittsburgh as an athlete, became determined to find sports he could participate in. He found that in sitting volleyball.

He says his attitude had everything to do with his quick adjustment to the sport.

"You tell me, 'no' and I'm going to try to do it," Stuck said. "That's basically what it took was me being hard headed and determined to want to get back into sports."

Sitting volleyball requires participants to keep some portion of their body between their hips and shoulders in contact with the floor. The net is lower, around 45 inches high and many of the participants, like Stuck, are amputees.

The U.S. Paralympic Sitting Volleyball Men's and Women's teams competed against teams from Canada at the Colorado Crossroads National Qualifier at the Colorado Convention Center. Both the men's and women's teams are based at their national training center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

If you want more information about the sport, you can visit U.S. Volleyball's Web site at www.usavolleyball.org.