Student-Led Club Welcomes Special Olympics at CA

Colorado Academy’s largest student-led organization, HOPE, has for more than 30 years served local families in need through a months-long clothing and essentials drive that culminates in a December service day, welcoming hundreds or even thousands of visitors to campus and involving scores of CA volunteers.

This year, three Juniors are hoping their efforts to establish CA’s first Special Olympics Club will someday make an impact that’s as significant and long-lived. If their inaugural offering is any evidence—a soccer team for Special Olympics athletes that is the result of more than a year’s worth of planning and recruiting—then the outlook for this “new HOPE” looks promising.

 

Taylor Bezoza, Claire Hawk, and Bella Torres, the initiative’s leaders, are determined to see Special Olympics find a home at CA. “When we spoke to the organization, they let us know that we’re actually in an underserved area for athletes with intellectual disabilities,” explains Hawk. Plenty of area schools offer “adapted” athletics as part of their own special education programming, but not all have official squads—known as “Unified” teams—serving Special Olympics participants.

Adds Bezoza, “In our research we saw a long list of schools around the state that partner with Special Olympics; we thought CA ought to be on that list.”

The 600-plus Unified Champion Schools in Colorado, mostly public, offer a variety of sports programs year round which pair Special Olympics athletes with Unified “partners,” individuals without intellectual disabilities, to train and compete side-by-side in everything from alpine skiing to bowling. Bezoza has volunteered as a figure skating partner for many years, and Hawk and Torres both participated in Unified soccer through Regis University.

“I was just blown away by the joy I saw,” Hawk says. “It felt so rewarding for the athletes and partners; we all wanted to bring it to CA in some way.”

Unified partners don’t take the field or court as helpers or coaches, Hawk points out; they play as teammates. “We’re there to allow them to achieve their own success. These athletes—high school-age like us—are constantly being told by other people what they can and can’t do. Many of them face bullying every day at school. When they come to practice with us, they bring so much excitement; those barriers go away.”

Finding support everywhere

CA’s Unified soccer team met for practices throughout this spring, bringing around a dozen athletes and the same number of CA partners to Slater Turf Field on Monday evenings. Led by PollyBeth Hawk, Claire’s mom and a part-time coach with the CA Field Hockey program, the high schoolers usually ran through typical warmup exercises and drills, then played a short-field scrimmage. Scorers in these friendly contests were just as likely to be Special Olympics athletes as CA Varsity Soccer starters like Torres.

 

Their season ended with a bang on May 18, when they competed successfully against other Unified teams in the Special Olympics Front Range Soccer Tournament, a regional competition that hosts 60 teams in four divisions based on skill level. CA’s Unified athletes were thrilled to earn first place in their division.

 

Work to bring this authentic sports experience—so readily accessible for other high school athletes—to a group of Special Olympics participants just as eager to play began more than a year ago.

“I had wanted to do something like this since Ninth Grade,” recounts Bezoza. “When we started looking into what it would take last year, we realized how much work would be involved.”

Unified teams are mainly sponsored by public schools, where special education departments have the resources and experience to support athletes with disabilities. Special Olympics Colorado was gratified, and a little surprised, to hear from the three CA Sophomores interested in starting a club, and told them of a number of athletes at nearby Bear Creek High School in Lakewood who could benefit. 

 

But first, the club leaders would have to work through complex health and safety regulations, insurance requirements, and space and scheduling logistics. They enlisted the help of Assistant Head of School Amy Wintermeyer, English teacher and faculty sponsor Mike Stanitski, and Athletic Director Jon Hill to tackle the biggest challenges, and by the start of their Junior year, the leaders were focused on recruiting and onboarding the CA partners they’d need to field a team. They attended a conference hosted at the University of Colorado by Special Olympics Colorado, and they arranged for training on inclusion in sport for CA volunteers.

Floored by an outpouring of student interest and continued support from faculty and staff, they were able to kick off this first season of spring soccer in near-record time. The team’s official uniforms, adorned with the CA logo, arrived right before their May tournament. And the three leaders were able to complete their Junior year Community Impact Project, a CA graduation requirement, by documenting their efforts.

Says Hawk, “Special Olympics Colorado told us that it usually takes much longer to get a Unified program underway.” The organization also celebrated CA’s offer of space for practice sessions. “We feel very fortunate the Athletic Department allowed us to use the entirety of Slater Field. Unified teams rarely have access to facilities as nice as ours.”

Torres underscores, “We had so many people supporting us—students, faculty, coaches, administrators. We could never have done this without them.”

Showing up with curiosity

Hawk, who is also a member of the Special Olympics Youth Activation Committee that steers the Unified Champion Schools program, says, “Unified sports is the epitome of Special Olympics. It allows our students to form connections and truly understand people with intellectual disabilities.”

 

Volunteering is about more than participating in a service activity for a single day, she notes. “I just wrote an essay in English class about empathy. People talk about empathy as ‘putting yourself in someone else’s shoes,’ but when I think about the athlete I’ve been working with, Javier, it’s impossible for me to put myself in his shoes. He sees the world very differently than I do.”

 

Special Olympics, says Hawk, “has changed my perspective on empathy: It’s about connecting the best that you can—not necessarily understanding everything, but more like listening with curiosity.”

Of course, those benefits run both ways. Notes Bezoza, “It’s really fun to have a friendship with someone who isn’t going to judge you.”

 

Torres offers, “I've been able to develop relationships with a couple of players, and they aren’t always perfect; no relationship ever is. But sometimes it’s your actions that matter the most—maybe I’ll pass someone the ball, or maybe when someone scores I’ll go over and give them a high-five. Showing up is a big part of this.”

Rave reviews of the fledgling program from the Special Olympics participants’ parents seem to indicate that showing up is working—and that expanding the club’s programming next year could be in the cards, too.

“We’re hoping to offer a different sport all three trimesters,” explains Bezoza. “And then we want to keep the program going in the future.” Bezoza, Hawk, and Torres all have Ninth Grade siblings who might even “inherit” the Special Olympics Club, they joke.

“The dream would be seeing Unified sports at CA continue for a long time—maybe not to the extent that HOPE has succeeded, but at least becoming one of those traditions that happens every year.”

Hawk goes on, “I assumed we’d have a pretty rough start, maybe that it wouldn’t even happen, but just one practice into this season, all that hard work felt worth it. I’ve never felt like I’ve been a part of something more important in my life.”