Six athletes connected with TIRR Memorial Hermann qualified for the 2024 Paralympics, held this summer in Paris.
The group—shooter Jazmin “Jaz” Almlie, triathlete Mark Barr, basket- ball player Kaitlyn Eaton, swimmer Ahalya Lettenberger, basketball player Fabian Romo and para- athletics track competitor Chelsea Stein—competed in their respective sports during the event from Aug. 23 through Sept. 9, following the Olympics, which also took place in Paris.
“That they qualified for the Paralympics, and consistently compete at the highest level of their respective sports, highlights the strength and resilience of these athletes,” says Gerard E. Francisco, MD, chief medical officer of TIRR Memorial Hermann. “Over the years, several Paralympians have entrusted us with their care, and they have gone on to achieve such great things athletically.”
Almlie, Barr, Eaton, Lettenberger, Romo and Stein are all experienced athletes on the Paralympic stage.
Almlie is a long-time member of the TIRR Memorial Hermann Texans Wheelchair Rugby Team and is affiliated with the USA Shooting Team. The Paris Games marked her third Paralympics in shooting, since her first in 2016.
Barr, who lives in Houston, was competing in his fourth Paralympics. He qualified as a para-swimmer in 2004 and 2008 and as a para- triathlete in 2016 and 2024. This year, Barr took home a bronze medal in his class in para-triathlon.
The California native's relationship with TIRR Memorial Hermann began in 2013 when he started his career as a nurse at Ben Taub Hospital, which, like TIRR Memorial Hermann, is located in the Texas Medical Center in Houston. Since then, Barr has served as a mentor to patients at TIRR Memorial Hermann as part of the system’s golf team for Brothers in Arms, which provides diversity scholarships for student athletes.
Eaton, a Houston native, represented Team USA in women’s wheelchair basketball in both the 2020 and 2024 Paralympics, winning a bronze and a silver medal, respectively, with her teammates.
Born with sacral agenesis and missing a sacrum, which affects her lower limbs, Eaton began playing wheelchair basketball as a high school sophomore in 2010 and was also a member of the TIRR MemorialHermann Junior Houston Hotwheels from 2010 to 2012.
“Being able to see any sport at all and knowing it’s available to me really started with the TIRR Memorial Hermann Adapted Sports and Recreation program,” Eaton says. That program is led by Peggy Turner, the system’s athletics community liaison and adapted sports and recreation coordinator.
Eaton, in turn, credits the sport not only with bringing her to the international stage, but also with helping her to get an education. She earned a Master of Social Work from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2021.
“Only so many people get to compete at this level,” she says of being a part of Team USA at the Paralympics. “It’s an honor.”
Illinois native Lettenberger, who was born with arthrogryposis amyoplasia, a musculoskeletal disorder that affects her lower limbs, has been volunteering as a swimming instructor with TIRR Memorial Hermann’s Adapted Sports and Recreation program and mentoring athletes since she arrived in Houston to attend college in 2019. She has always been an athlete and began swimming at age 11 to help manage chronic hip pain caused by bilateral hip dysplasia. She got involved with para-swimming a year later, and she now competes at the NCAA Division I level at Rice University.
Paris marked Lettenberger’s second Paralympics. She won silver in the 200-meter individual medley during Tokyo 2020 and in her class finished fifth in the 400-meter freestyle and sixth in the 100-meter breaststroke in France.
Romo, a Houston native and former member of the TIRR Memorial Hermann Junior Houston Hotwheels, participated in his first Paralympics in Paris, suiting up for Team USA, which won gold at this year’s games. A gold medal winner with the Team USA men’s wheelchair basketball team in the 2023 World Championships, he plays professional wheelchair basketball in Spain after leading the University of Texas-Arlington to a national championship in the sport in 2017. Romo had his left leg amputated at age 4 due to a birth defect.
Finally, Houston native Stein also competed in her first Paralympics in Paris, after taking up para-athletics in high school. A former patient at TIRR Memorial Hermann and current student at the University of Arizona, Stein raced in several para-athletic events this summer: the women’s 100, 400 and 800 meters, finishing seventh, eighth and seventh in her class, respectively. Turner describes her as a “mentor” to athletes in the TIRR Memorial Hermann Adapted Sports program, sharing with them her experiences of being a competitor at the college level.
“The Adapted Sports and Recreation program at TIRR Memorial Hermann gives these athletes an opportunity they don’t get anywhere else, and that is to play sports at a competitive level,” Turner says. “But they did all the work. They took that opportunity and went on to compete at the highest level. Their achievements serve as an inspiration for all of our adapted sports athletes and really all of the patients at TIRR Memorial Hermann, that they can go on and do anything they want in life.”
Turner attended her ninth Paralympic Games (she worked with Team USA at the 1992 and 1996 Paralympic Games) in Paris and followed the athletes associated with TIRR Memorial Hermann. She was joined by Marcie Kern, a spinal cord injury physical therapist with Memorial Hermann Health System and a volunteer with the Adapted Sports and Recreation program.
As thrilling as their accomplishments were in Paris, the fact that the six are committed to mentoring fellow athletes at home is even more important, Turner notes.
“Historically, young people with disabilities who want to participate in sports have not had these mentors, so that these Paralympians want to give back in this way is so vital,” she explains. “But it’s who they are. It’s in their hearts. They know what it’s like to feel excluded and don’t want others to feel that way.”
Rhonda Abbott, senior vice president and CEO of TIRR Memorial Hermann, adds, “I had the opportunity to watch these athletes participate in qualifying, and it really gives them a platform to share with people of the world that people with disabilities can do anything.”
Mark Barr—from Practitioner to Paralympian
When champion swimmer Mark Barr was diagnosed with bone cancer as a teenager, no one would have blamed him for putting sports on the back burner, particularly after losing his right leg to the disease in 2000.
Instead, the multisport athlete used competition and training as a catalyst for rehabilitation. Since then, the former TIRR Memorial Hermann patient, who has gone on to become a nurse, has reached the highest level in sport, competing as a para-swimmer in the 2004 and 2008 Paralympic Games and in the para-triathlon at the 2016 and 2024 Paralympic Games.
In fact, the 2024 Paralympic Games, in Paris, marked yet another comeback for Barr, who tore the meniscus in his left leg while fishing in Galveston and missed the rescheduled 2020 competition, held in 2021 in Tokyo. “It was the best therapy I could ask for,” Barr says of para-swimming and sports in general, per the Houston Chronicle. “Once you’re in the water, it’s the most freeing and liberating thing… everyone’s the same in the water.”
However, not every Paralympian is the same as Barr when it comes to athletic achievement. In Athens in 2004, he finished fourth in his class in the 400-meter freestyle and 100-meter butterfly, and four years later, he placed sixth in his class in the 100-meter freestyle relay and seventh in his class in the 100-meter medley relay in Beijing.
He switched to para-triathlon in 2010, a sport that was added to the Paralympic Games in 2016 in Rio, and finished fourth in the competition that year, just off the medal podium. This year, Barr won bronze in the para-triathlon sprint race in Paris, which included a 750-meter swim in the Seine River and a 20-kilometer bike ride along the Champs-Élysées.
Para-triathlon “went from being a hobby to a way to go back to the Paralympics,” he says.
But Barr’s inspiring story transcends the athletic arena. After earning a bachelor’s degree in nutrition science at California Polytechnic State University in 2009 and a second bachelor’s degree at Drexel University’s College of Nursing and Health Professions in 2011, he came to Ben Taub Hospital in Houston in 2012 for the nursing internship program.
He stayed with Ben Taub for the next seven and a half years, becoming a nurse in the Trauma Surgical ICU and eventually a charge nurse.
“He helps other athletes, other patients, just see what’s possible,” notes Peggy Turner, the athletics community liaison and adapted sports and recreation coordinator at TIRR Memorial Hermann.
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