James McQuillan playing for Victoria at the Wheelchair Rugby National Championship

The former Albury footballer is in the Victoria side heading to the Gold Coast for the Wheelchair Rugby National Championship.

McQuillan, who helped Australia to gold at the World Championship in October, his first major tournament, has got that big-game buzz back once again.

"It's a great opportunity to get the whole Australian wheelchair rugby community together and test ourselves against the best," he said.

"Everyone in our team, bar one, has played for the national side and the other is Stu Robinson, a high-quality import from Great Britain.

"We've got a lot of experience in our team, players who have played quite a few games for Australia and a couple, like myself, who are newer to the scene so it's a really good mix."

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Victoria are in Division 1 with NSW, Queensland and New Zealand. Pool matches will be wrapped up by lunchtime on Saturday ahead of semi-finals and then the gold and bronze medal matches on Sunday.

"I've come a long way since I first starting playing 18 months ago," McQuillan said.

"It's been full steam ahead since Christmas because we've got a very big year ahead of us.

"There are qualification events for the 2024 Paralympics so my game has been developing quite a lot.

"I've been putting the work in on court and we fly to Japan in four weeks for our Asia/Oceania qualifiers to hopefully book our place in Paris.

"So there's a very big couple of months of wheelchair rugby coming up."

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