Special Olympics has long been providing athletic competition opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities. But did you know there are varsity high school teams where those athletes compete alongside their general education peers?
Anthony Poell didn’t know, until recently. On Monday he attended the Baugo Community Schools board meeting, and he was thrilled to see the board approve a new sport that his son, Asher, can participate in at Jimtown High School.
The board approved adding Unified Track & Field as a varsity sport. Unified Sports involve high school students with intellectual disabilities playing on the same teams with other students.
So far, there are two unified sports in Indiana high school athletics: track and field and flag football. Poell thinks running on the track team will be a great opportunity for Asher, a Jimtown sophomore who has autism.
"I'm so excited that he's going to have all these new experiences," Poell said. "It's something right up my son's alley. There are very limited things my son can participate in."
Poell said he had never heard of unified sports before Jimtown teachers Jessica Baker and Troy Bontrager told him about their plans to ask the board’s approval for the team.
Bontrager teaches at Jimtown’s alternative school and said he’s excited to start practicing with the team in March.
"I'm just super proud of Baugo Schools and Jimtown High School for just embracing the inclusivity of this program, and just saying Jimtown is going to do this," Bontrager said. "It just makes me feel great about being a teacher here, it really does."
Bontrager said it was Baker who nudged him to go before the board with the proposal. Baker, who teaches special education at Jimtown, said she learned about the joys of unified sports after watching her 17-year-old daughter, Emma, who has special needs, competing as a student on Penn High School’s unified track team.
"So going to the track meets, as a parent, as a special ed teacher, I'm like ugly crying because everyone is cheering on these kids that have something wrong mentally or physically," Baker said. "It feels good. Everyone's cheering for everybody, it's just awesome. It's very heartwarming to see the inclusion, the acceptance that everybody's different. It's just a great feeling."
Neither Bontrager nor Baker have track and field coaching experience. Baker jokes that she did run track in middle school. They plan to recruit members of the school’s general education track team to help coach.
"They can be assistants and tell the kids like how to hand off the baton for the relay, or you need to have so many steps before the long jump," Baker said.
Unified sports have existed in Indiana for 10 years. The Indiana High School Athletic Association partnered with Special Olympics Indiana in 2012 to create a new organization, Champions Together.
About 120 Indiana High Schools have unified track teams, and 44 schools have unified flag football.
In Michiana, nine schools have unified track and field teams: Penn, Elkhart, Goshen, Laville, Mishawaka, Northwood, Adams, Riley and Wawasee. Five schools have flag football: Adams, Elkhart, Goshen, Northwood and Wawasee.
While Baker and Bontrager just want the special education athletes to have fun, and fun is very important, they’ll quickly learn that these students also want to compete, says Brian Avery, director of Champions Together, the joint IHSAA-Special Olympics organization that runs Unified Sports.
"It gives a group of students and a group of students' parents an opportunity to represent their school," Avery said. "Compete, not just participate. It's about competition. There's a scoreboard, and there's a winner and there's a loser. There's trophies to be given and championships to be won. So it's not just, hey, let's go out there and have fun. Not that having fun isn't part of what we want to do, but it's meant to be spirited competition."
Poell said that like many kids with autism, Asher struggles with social interactions at times.
"He's socially awkward, a little bit, but I think that doing these other activities with other kids and different people, especially out of school, I think it's just going to hopefully open him up, and like I said, make new friends and give him something to do," Poell said. "I think that this is something that will really help him be able to interact with people more."
