After the Podium: How Matt Scott Found a Career Beyond Sport with Making Space
Making Space was founded to create new pathways to employment and ensure access to meaningful careers for Disabled people . Through a $250,000 grant from GitLab Foundation, Making Space recently launched the Ascend Program — a new 10-month initiative to connect disabled professionals with competitive, sustainable employment while helping companies build more inclusive hiring practices. We expect this project to provide 123x ROI, driving increased annual incomes of $37,200 for 100 individuals.
Competing on the world’s biggest stage with millions watching his every move never fazed Matt Scott — he’s done it five times and has three medals to show for it. After achieving every goal he set for himself as an elite athlete, he retired a champion, but faced a new challenge: building a career beyond the court.
Born with spine bifida and the inability to walk, Matt has used a wheelchair for as long as he can remember. He grew up surrounded by street basketball courts in Michigan and became a serious basketball fan, idolizing players from an early age.
At the time, adaptive sports like wheelchair basketball were largely overlooked, and Paralympic athletes rarely received the recognition they deserved. All of Matt’s athletic heroes were able-bodied, but at 14, when he picked up wheelchair basketball, he set out to change that narrative for future generations of disabled athletes.
“Even as a young kid, I was thinking, ‘When I’m done with this game, I want to be someone that other kids can look up to as they’re playing ball,’” said Matt. “That was always a North Star for me.”
Recruited for the U.S. men’s national wheelchair basketball team right out of high school, Matt’s athletic career took off. As a member of the U.S. national team for 18 years, he won a bronze medal at the 2012 Paralympics, followed by gold medals in 2016 and at the Tokyo 2020 games.
Until his retirement, wheelchair basketball had been at the core of Matt’s life, so breaking into the professional world with an nontraditional career path was daunting, especially as someone living with a disability. Employer bias, inaccessible education and hiring processes, and a lack of accommodations and representation in the workplace are just a few of the barriers disabled professionals face when trying to enter the workforce.
“I wouldn’t say wheelchair basketball was a big part of my identity, wheelchair basketball was my identity,” said Matt. “Being an athlete was everything for me, so to make a transition to doing other things and trying new skills was a challenge for me.”
Matt secured a position as a business associate with Visa shortly after retiring, but he also found another opportunity with Making Space. Making Space invited him to join a sports broadcasting training program in partnership with NBC. In this program, Matt and other Disabled participants gained hands-on experience in a real studio environment. Over the next few days, they read scripts, talked in front of teleprompters, met with journalists and producers and got real-time feedback from their recorded sessions.
Without that opportunity, Matt said, he likely wouldn’t have secured the training or exposure needed to break into the industry. Today, Matt has returned to the Paralympic stage — not as an athlete, but as a storyteller. He covered the Paris Games in 2024 and is set to do the same for the Los Angeles 2028 Games, a dream he never thought he could achieve so early in his career. He credits a lot of this success to the bootcamp, mentorship and exposure he received from Making Space.
To further his advocacy efforts, he started Fly Without Limits, a global social impact foundation aimed at breaking down barriers that prevent people with disabilities from reaching their goals and dreams.
“I can’t state enough how important organizations like Making Space are for this community,” said Matt. “Because of their advocacy, they’re empowering so many people like myself who don’t lack the drive to make things happen but sometimes lack the connections or right conversations.”
