En garde! GCU alum advances to Paralympics

Grand Canyon University alumna Jataya Taylor is an all-out monsoon.

She is a fury.

A force.

The Marine veteran has sliced across snowy mountains as a Nordic cross country skier, battered her lungs as a biathlon athlete and track-and-field competitor, swam, cycled, climbed rocks – defeated them – and skimmed across peaks as a snowboarder.

She didn’t care what sport; she just wanted to sport.

So it’s ironic that Taylor, so high-velocity and so adrenaline-powered, would find her happy place in wheelchair fencing, a sport that depends as much on physicality as it does strategy, where it’s not about playing harder but playing smarter.

And it’s the sport that is taking her to the Paralympics.

“It’s funny, because in all the other sports I’ve done, if I get fouled … I can get really aggressive. But fencing is really calming to me, and so it allows me to use the logic in my brain and my athleticism. It’s something you don’t get to do very often in other sports,” Taylor said.

The Aurora, Colorado, resident will travel to Paris in a few weeks to compete in the Paralympic Games, which will include some 4,000 athletes competing to win almost 550 medals on the biggest stage in parasports from Aug. 28-Sept. 9.

What’s also mind-boggling is that parrying and lunging weren’t even in Taylor’s vocabulary. She had never heard of parafencing and didn’t even start competing in it until two years ago.

“I grew up in a small town in Florida, and fencing was nowhere on my radar,” said Taylor in a Zoom call from Denver, where she trains. “I might have seen it in the movies or a show, and then I didn’t even know there was anything called wheelchair fencing.”

Taylor happened to be visiting the Denver Fencing Center with a group from the local Veterans Affairs hospital in 2022, and that was it. She was hooked.

And now the center, a national hub for wheelchair fencing, has been her home away from home.

Rising to become a Paralympian wasn’t in Taylor’s life plan when she graduated from high school, where she made an impression on her high school basketball team.

She had one goal: to serve in the military, like her Air Force father.

Her plan was to enlist in the Army and work in linguistics – “I believe communication is a huge factor in solving problems,” she said – but the Army recruiter wasn’t at his desk at the time.

“The recruiter was off doing whatever he wanted and I was just like, I need to get this done, so I said, ‘I’m just going to talk to the Marine recruiter instead',” and joined in 2005.

It was during training exercises not long after that when she sustained two serious injuries, a multidirectional dislocation to her right shoulder, then an injury to her left knee. She would also injure her ankle and was confined to a wheelchair.

A rare connective tissue disorder made it impossible for doctors to repair the damage.

Just like that, her military career ended.

“It kind of flipped my world upside down because I had one goal – the military – and I didn’t realize that you can get hurt and not get better.”

Not one to give up, Taylor continued to walk on her leg, withstanding the pain for more than 10 years when she made a life-changing decision.

She told her doctors to amputate the leg, or she would.

In 2017, doctors did just that, but what some might see as a loss, she saw as a new beginning – a sense of freedom after years of pain, though the years of struggling with her health weren’t easy.

Taylor fought depression and doubt; adaptive sports would save her life.

She relished competition and, in 2018, was honored with the Disabled American Veterans Freedom Award, given annually to a veteran who demonstrates courage in their recovery.

Another bright light was Taylor’s pursuit at GCU of her master’s degree in public health in the midst of the COVID pandemic.

She wasn’t really thinking about going back to school, but a representative from GCU happened to be at the same women’s veterans meeting Taylor was attending.

“It just happened to be a blessing at the time because I had really no direction in my life,” said Taylor, who wanted to finish a master’s in legal studies but because of her health issues thought she’d take a different route.

“I wanted to figure out how to help people,” she said, and just knew she loved the outdoors and access to the outdoors and told her GCU counselor, “If I have a problem, I don’t step back. I won’t back down.”

“They were like, ‘Why don’t you try public health?”

She uses that knowledge in her job for the Denver Fencing Foundation, in which she creates and coordinates programs and applies for grants.

“I actually finished the last part of my master’s while I was handcycling across Africa,” she said. “It was like, this is a perfect opportunity. I get to explore new cultures and see how they live and the issues they face. I was able to bring that back and incorporate it in everything I’m doing right now with our foundation, including starting a fencing program in Namibia.”

All the while, Taylor continues to embrace fencing outside of her 8-to-5 job.

She’ll be in Paris competing in women’s foil and épée, and will be there with Team USA fencing, which “makes it that much more exciting because we get to feed off of each other, support each other – it definitely gets crazy because you’re trying to balance work with training with health with a personal life and then family.”

The parafencing community has been her source of strength in many ways.

She also gets strength from another source: her faith.

It’s why she chose GCU, and it’s what keeps her grounded in her sometimes crazy life.

She wanted to incorporate religion into what she was learning, especially in public health “because religion and beliefs play such a huge part in our health choices,” she said.

And when she’s in her white fencing uniform, her wheelchair attached to the ground, facing the opponent across from her, she won’t just be depending on her physical ability and her mental acuity to carry her through.

“I like to sit back and pray for a minute and just get my head in the right space,” Taylor said.

It takes a little faith to be a force.

GCU Manager of Internal Communications Lana Sweeten-Shults can be reached at [email protected] or at 602-639-7901.

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