When Luke Assimon, a sophomore at Fayetteville-Manlius high school, heaved a shot as the buzzer sounded, he screeched in excitement. The rest of his basketball team met him at the free throw line to celebrate a 35-21 win over West Genesee. It’s a moment that never would’ve happened without Unified Sports.

Unified teams are a co-ed partnership of athletes (students with disabilities) and partners (students without disabilities). Each team has three athletes and two partners on the court at once, and the partners set the athletes up for success. F-M and other Section III schools launched their unified basketball programs in 2017.

There are no barriers between the athletes and partners, Assimon said — the teams strive to support each other. Unified Sports is a merger of the Special Olympics and high school sports associations, F-M athletic director Scott Sugar said. It allows students with disabilities to participate in school sports like their peers. For Assimon and his fellow athletes, it has provided an opportunity to play sports they thought they couldn’t play.

“It’s special to me because I get to play and work as a team with my friends,” Tobias Dixie, Assimon’s teammate, said. “I remember when I made my free throw last year.”

Every player has an unique role, said F-M head coach and special education teacher Katie Carlson. Some athletes compete in the game and others are skill players who are active at halftime, when they work on dribbling, passing and shooting. There are others who cheer the team on from the stands, she said.

Helena Jotic is one of those players. As one of F-M’s athletes, she’s part of the cheerleading squad. She loves dancing and wearing pompoms, but more importantly, she knows people looking across the way can hear her cheer.

Athletes don’t get cut from the team, Carlson said, but recruiting partners can be a complicated process. It’s important to have partners who put others first, she said.

“We want everyone to go hard as they would in any game … and encourage the partners to pass the ball often and get rebounds but to also go hard and not easy on a kid,” Carlson said. “We want the experience to be genuine yet fair and tell the partners to play to the level of [the partners on] the other team.”

Courtesy of Katie Carlson

When the Special Olympics Unified Champion Schools program was created in 2008, it was comprised of 493 schools, but by 2016, it had expanded to 2,311 schools, per the UCS Year 9 Evaluation Report. As some Rochester schools have expanded Unified Sports to the middle school level, other schools nationwide have just started teams, hoping to someday match Rochester’s progress, Nelson said.

The national organization currently offers unified basketball and bowling teams, but expansion is on the agenda, said Nathan Johnson, the senior director of Unified Sports. Eventually, Johnson hopes for a Unified Sport offered every high school season, and expanded to younger kids in elementary and pre-school. To fill the empty fall season, Sugar said, soccer or track and field could be the next sport to be unified.

“This program gives an opportunity to students who have previously not had the opportunity to participate in interscholastic athletics, which many of us take for granted,” Nelson said. “It also promotes and improves school culture by increasing awareness and acceptance of all students.”   

And for F-M’s Marlee Matto, that’s what being apart of the team has done. She’s built meaningful relationships after being introduced to a team, she said.

Using sports to unite students with and without disabilities is the foundation of this program and different schools and states have different ways of doing so, said New York State Public High School Athletic Association associate director Todd Nelson. By promoting the acceptance of all students, it helps students participate in athletics, Nelson said, something many people take for granted.

Said Johnson: “Providing young people with and without intellectual disabilities to play together, plan together, and lead together helps to change perceptions and eliminate stereotypes and stigmas.”

Published on May 15, 2019 at 2:15 pm

gfpagano@syr.edu