Jacob Sharff and Jeremy Boyd were at opposite ends of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens on Wednesday when a chair umpire’s voice crackled over their two-way radios: “Wheelchair tech needed on Court 13.”
In less than a minute the two men, in wheelchairs themselves, converged on the court to discover that a small caster wheel had come loose on Daniel Caverzaschi’s chair. The technicians had 15 minutes to fix it or Mr. Caverzaschi, a Spanish player, would be disqualified from the match.
Mr. Sharff slid from his chair onto the court, and the two men repaired the wheel in just seconds. Play resumed.
Mr. Sharff, Mr. Boyd and a third technician named Mike Sheen are the trio of specialists who make up a kind of tennis pit crew, responsible for quickly repairing any wheelchairs that break at the U.S. Open.
Quickness is key. Calls are rare, perhaps one a day, but if the problem cannot be fixed in the allotted 15 minutes, the player is disqualified.
All day, they patrol the courts, spreading out over the grounds to maximize their coverage, waiting to spring into action.
“It’s very stressful,” Mr. Boyd said. “The last thing you want is to be unable to fix something, and the player loses because of it. You feel like you’ve let them down.”
Two years ago, in a men’s quad wheelchair semifinal, a pole on the backrest of Ymanitu Silva’s chair fractured in two. The match was in Louis Armstrong Stadium and the repair crew, all in wheelchairs, had to get from the wheelchair storage tent in a back corner of the grounds into the stadium, fighting their way through the crowds. It felt like a painfully long journey, and once they were there, it got worse.
The aluminum post on Mr. Silva’s chair required welding, and even if the crew could have accomplished the feat in 15 minutes, more time would be needed for the metal to cool. They pondered improvising a solution, something they have done many times before, but this problem was unfixable. Mr. Silva and his partner, Tomas Masaryk, defaulted.
In six years, it was the only time that a player under the team’s care was disqualified as a result of a chair malfunction.
“I blew out a tire two years ago and they fixed it in about 5 minutes,” said Aniek Van Koot, the No. 2 seed and 2013 U.S. Open women’s singles wheelchair champion. “If I had to fix it myself, it would have taken two hours. They keep us rolling on court.”
Blown tires are the most common issue, and Mr. Sharff, who oversees the repair team, said that when that happens it makes a loud, unmistakable pop. Sometimes a player will run into a wall, and a strap might break. Sometimes a seat malfunctions, or a caster wheel falls off.
The technicians carry toolboxes and a portable electric air pump for inflating the inner tubes. They also do nonemergency repairs and tuneups before and after matches, without the time constraints.
Mr. Sharff, a para-triathlete from West Palm Beach, Fl., founded an adaptive sports equipment store called How iRoll Sports in 2013, and began working for the U.S. Tennis Association as a technician for college wheelchair events in the area. They asked him to do it at the U.S. Open.
Because matches are spread out over several courts, and because time is a factor, they added two more to his team.
One is Mr. Boyd, who won a wheelchair national championship at the University of Alabama. Another was Andrew Bogdanov, but Mr. Bogdanov had to drop out because he had qualified to play in the tournament.
Mr. Bogdanov was replaced by Mr. Sheen, a British engineer who designed many of the high-performance wheelchairs that are popular with players at the Open, and the founder of Sheen Parasport. He also designs custom-made cases for air travel, where some of the worst damage occurs to the specialized wheelchairs.
Ms. Van Koot called airline treatment of the chairs, “appalling,” and Mr. Sharff is regularly asked to repair those damaged in air travel or to verify an insurance claim.
“Sometimes I’m scratching my head, thinking, ‘You had to try to break this chair like this,’” he said.
Once the tournaments start, the men feel responsible for every chair.
On Thursday, another emergency call came in, again to come to the aid of Mr. Caverzaschi, who this time had a blown tire. Mr. Sheen, who was standing nearby, hopped over the fence; Mr. Sharff and Mr. Boyd rolled in seconds later. They popped off the wheel as though it were a Formula 1 race, wedged off the tire, ripped out the blown inner tube and replaced it and used the electric pump to blow the tube up, all in under four minutes.
“It’s an adrenaline rush,” Mr. Sharff said. “You don’t wish for someone to have a problem, but it’s a good feeling when we are able to do what we do well.”
David Waldstein is a Times reporter who writes about the New York region, with an emphasis on sports.
Hiroko Masuike is a New York-based photographer and photo editor for The Times.
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