Chris Stoutenberg is looking to make history later this summer.

The Collingwood resident is a shooting guard on the Canadian men's wheelchair basketball team that will be competing in the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing in September.

The team is two-time defending gold medalists and are going for a third, a feat that no other team has achieved in summer Paralympic or Olympic competition.

"It's a chance to make history," he said.

Stoutenberg said the team has plenty of depth, as nine members of the squad have been playing together for about a decade.

He said the group also changes its style of play to keep their opponents on their toes.

"We try to change so teams can't prepare for us," he said.

Stoutenberg will be traveling to Atlanta later this week and will also be participating in tournaments in Birmingham, Milwaukee, Vancouver and Germany. In January, the team won a pre-Paralympic tournament in Beijing and are the defending world champions.

However, this year's Paralympics has a little more meaning for the 30-year-old as he is dedicating the performance to his mother, Sandra Stoutenberg, who died last year.

Stoutenberg said his best performance was at the 2006 World Championships in Amsterdam, a tournament where he won most valuable player.

"It only happens every four years," he said. "She was there. Her doctor gave her a choice."

Stoutenberg said his mother was a basketball coach at Collingwood Collegiate Institute and was the person who got him involved in sports.

"She was my biggest fan," he said.

Stoutenberg works for the town's events department and is involved in planning the Elvis Festival and the Sesquicentennial Celebrations, in addition to keeping up his training regiment.

He said he plans to take a year off from the national team.