"With a little ambition, you can achieve anything"

When he was ten years old, Hubert Hager's life changed decisively: He was on a school trip with his classmates when a car suddenly crashed into the group and crushed him against a wall. He was in a coma for half a year - the doctors could not save his leg. Since then, he has been an above-knee amputee on the right side. For the now 22-year-old, however, there is no reason to quarrel with himself and his life. "Looking back, it was an opportunity for me - as bad as it was at the time," says Hager. He did not become a professional footballer, but he did become a wheelchair basketball player. One who now earns his living with the sport. "Not everyone is granted the opportunity to turn their hobby into a profession," says Hubert Hager. And very importantly, he has also met wonderful people through sport - for example in 2016 at the Paralympics youth camp in Rio de Janeiro.

When you hear him talk like that, it all seems "quite normal" for the 22-year-old. Quite modest, considering that he is on the road with his team, the "Thuringia Bulls", in the 1st Bundesliga and thus a two-time German champion in 2019/20 as well as 2020/21, Cup winner and Champions League runner-up. In addition, Hager is a cadre athlete for Austria's national wheelchair basketball team, to which he was called up in 2016, was the City of Vienna's Disabled Athlete of the Year 2019 and Vienna's national champion in the 60-metre and 100-metre wheelchair sprint in 2017 and 2018. In 2020, he won the national title in the 100m sprint and reached the ECMB European Championship with the Austrian national team in June this year. What began in 2012 as a hobby with the "ABSV Lofic Dolphins Vienna" - he was already 16 years old at the time - is now a "full-blown" sports career after stops in Ulm and Munich. And what a career it is! For some, that alone would be life-filling, but Hubert Hager also finds time for his studies, which he started at the University of Erfurt in 2020.

And in doing so, "in my observation, he impresses with above-average performance - not only in his studies, but also outside the university," says his professor Arno Müller, who emphasises Hager's above-average commitment and nominated him this year for the DAAD Prize for Outstanding International Students, not least for this reason. Hubert Hager can "not only support his fellow students with his expertise from competitive sport, but also with his high level of social competence, but above all motivate them. He is a role model in many respects," Müller praises him.

How does he manage all this? "Above all, through a lot of support and understanding from the club, for example, if a block seminar is coming up and I can't come to training every day. Organisation is everything here," says Hager. "Basically, my day is pretty much always structured and planned, whereby asynchronous lectures are of course very helpful, which always find a good place between the training sessions. Then I also really try to make the most of every minute to get through as many lectures as possible and give myself a bit of breathing space for other things. And of course, there is also a disadvantage compensation for me, for example, already in apparatus gymnastics or in athletics. For example, because it is not possible for me to complete the Cooper test in athletics while walking, I was allowed to do it with the sports wheelchair and in addition the times were adjusted to my previous performance." But in this way, she says, the sport at university is just another way to get in a little training.

 "With a little ambition, you can achieve anything," Hubert Hager says and laughs. And his story seems to confirm him in this. "In studies, as in basketball, the same applies: you have to keep an overview on the court. You have to practise that, of course, but once you get the hang of it, you'll be fine."