Seven wheelchair football teams from across the country are rolling into Rosemont next weekend for a national tournament that will turn the outdoor fields at Wintrust Financial Campus into a two-day showcase of adaptive athletics. The 2026 GLASA USA Wheelchair Football League Chicago Tournament runs Saturday and Sunday, August 22-23, with games scheduled from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday at the Rosemont site.
As reported by FOX 32 Chicago, the event highlights the Chicago Bears and GLASA's role in growing the world of adaptive sports, bringing together wheelchair football squads from across the country for a weekend of competition. According to Around the Town Chicago, seven teams will take part, including the host GLASA Chicago Bears along with visiting clubs from Atlanta, Birmingham, Cleveland, New England, St. Petersburg, and Tampa Bay. The tournament wraps up with a 2 p.m. championship game on Sunday.
Bears Look to Defend Back-to-Back Titles
The GLASA Chicago Bears enter the weekend as a founding member of the league and the back-to-back champions of the Chicago Tournament in both 2024 and 2025, per the same outlet's report. The Chicago Bears NFL franchise co-founded the wheelchair team with GLASA, giving the host squad a built-in home-field advantage as it chases a third straight local title.
Beyond the games themselves, organizers are opening the sport up to newcomers. In tandem with the tournament on Sunday, GLASA and the Chicago Bears will host a free learn-to-play wheelchair football clinic offering provided wheelchairs and instruction for participants of all ages and skill levels, the outlet notes. The weekend will also feature a Touch-A-Truck experience and local food trucks alongside the on-field action.
A League Built Around Veterans
The USA Wheelchair Football League traces back to 2020, when it was launched by Move United through founding grant support from the NFL-Bob Woodruff Foundation Salute to Service Partnership, according to the Bob Woodruff Foundation. Move United is an affiliate of the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, and the partnership was designed to expand adaptive sports access for both veterans and civilians. Since that founding season, the league has grown from four founding teams to 15 teams nationwide, now serving more than 700 athletes including hundreds of military warfighters, per Move United.
That military connection is written into the league's rulebook. USA Wheelchair Football League rules require players to have a permanent lower-limb physical disability, and every tournament travel roster must include at least three military veterans, according to the Lakeshore Foundation. Travel rosters are capped at 14 players when teams fly to away tournaments.
How the Game Is Played
On the field, USAWFL games follow four 15-minute quarters played on a hard-surface 76-yard outdoor field, with players wearing helmets and executing chair-to-chair contact and touch tackles instead of traditional shoulder-pad hits, according to USA Football. The playing surface measures 76 by 22 yards including 8-yard end zones. To keep matchups fair across athletes with a wide range of physical abilities, the league enforces a functional classification system rating players from 1.0 to 5.0 based on movement ability, capping a team's total active on-field points at 21, per Move United's rulebook.
Local Roots Behind the National Event
The tournament's host organization, the Great Lakes Adaptive Sports Association, was founded in 1999 by Executive Director Cindy Housner with just three athletes, according to Lake Forest Love. The Lake Forest-based nonprofit now provides more than 20 adaptive sports to over 1,000 individuals annually across Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin, and it offers programming regardless of an athlete's ability to pay. That local infrastructure, paired with the NFL-backed national league, is what brings seven teams and a weekend of free community programming to Rosemont's Wintrust Financial Campus at 9701 W. Higgins Road.
