The South Street Hard Shells are one of the more competitive teams in the annual Travis Roy Foundation Wiffle ball tournament. Just ask the team captain, Tony McNaboe.

That they haven’t won a game in two years is moot. For McNaboe and his Maine-based squad, the competition is in raising funds for a foundation started by a man he’s known since both were boys in Yarmouth.

Travis Roy was the 20-year-old Boston University hockey player whose college career ended 11 seconds after it began. An on-ice accident left Roy paralyzed from the neck down. McNaboe was among those at his bedside soon after.

“I’ve done a lot of pretty incredible things in my life,” said McNaboe, a musician, “but nothing I’ve experienced is as powerful, as magical as that weekend in Vermont.”

The three-day tourney with a 24-team field begins Friday at quarter-scaled replicas of Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. Each team raises money to play. Early Saturday afternoon everything stops for the traditional money count; Roy steers his chair to the middle of Little Fenway and speaks from his heart.

“Sometimes I’m almost sobbing,” said McNaboe, who was a drummer in the original Rustic Overtones, a Maine rock/funk band, “but I manage to hold it together. With Travis, it’s not why did this happen to me. It’s become why did this happen for me.”

Roy is 37. His foundation helps direct money to the research of spinal cord injuries. It helps others who have become paralyzed by providing adaptive equipment. Some of those helped will come to the scaled-down ballfields on the farm in Essex, Vt., and tell their stories.

The South Street Hard Shells are relative newcomers to the tourney, in its 11th year. There is a waiting list. The team made up mostly of Roy’s childhood friends raised about $25,000 over the last two years. The single-year goal this time is $20,000. Thursday night at El Rayo Taqueria in Portland, 50 percent of the profits from 5 to 9 p.m. will go to the Travis Roy Foundation.

Last year the 24 teams raised more than $406,000.

Staff Writer Steve Solloway can be contacted at 791-6412 or at:

ssolloway@pressherald.com

Twitter: SteveSolloway