User:Ballislife-01

= Kauri Murray = Kauri Ezra Murray (born 6 February 1998) is a 4.0 point wheelchair basketball player from New Zealand. He is a seven-time National Champion playing for the Auckland Wheelbreakers. He is a current veteran player in the 'Roller Blacks ', New Zealand Men's senior wheelchair basketball team who competed at the 2017 IWBF Asia-Oceania Championships in Beijing, China where he made his international debut, and the 2024 IWBF Asia-Oceania Championships in Bangkok, Thailand.

Biography
Kauri Ezra Murray was born on 6 February 1998, and contracted poliomyelitis at five months after reacting to the second dose of the polio vaccine. It was a rare condition at the time since New Zealand was declared polio free in 1962. By the time he was 11 years old he required the use of crutches.

Murray first took up small-bore rifle shooting as a sport at the age of 14 before moving to other sports such as adaptive rowing and swimming, eventually switching to wheelchair basketball at the age of 16 when a local junior club was established. In 2014 he became a member of the Auckland Wheelstarz junior club before joining the Auckland Wheelbreakers, a senior regional club in the same year. Murray adapted the game, and in 2016 at the age of 18, he competed in the A Division of the New Zealand National Championships where his team won gold.

That same year he was selected for the New Zealand U23 Mens squad to compete at a development national tournament in Sydney, Australia. In 2017 he won his second consecutive National Championship in Tauranga, New Zealand. Later that year, aged just 19 years, he would go on to become one of three juniors in a squad roster of 12 players to be selected in the Men's senior national team for the 2017 IWBF Asia-Oceania Championships in Beijing, China. They finished the tournament at eleventh place, after beating United Arab Emirates 60-42 in the playoffs.

In 2018, Murray was a finalist for two awards; Junior Sportsman of the Year and the Uniquely Abled Award at the Otara Sports Awards.