People like me who write columns for newspapers and blogs for websites get to this point in the year and they do one of two things – either write a Christmas article about people in sports and what Santa can bring them for Christmas (which I have done), or they write a year-in-review of all the things that happened in that calendar year (have done that to).
Some do both.
Not for me. Not today.
I want to tell you about a program that has had a very big impact in school corporations around the state in a very short time.
Earlier this decade, a group of the best and brightest high school athletes, hand-picked by the commissioners of the Indiana High School Athletic Association from a pool of students nominated by their school’s administrators, were challenged to come up with something that would be a legacy for high school sports long after they graduated.
Man, did they ever come through.
Those kids wondered how they could give students who could never have made it onto high school sports teams a chance to compete on their high school teams.
After brainstorming and talking it through with their adult facilitators, they posed a question: “what if we took traditional student athletes and matched them up with students from Special Olympics on the same team?”
They called it “Unified Sports.”
It was brilliant.
The concept was presented to school corporations around the state, and a handful of schools embraced it. Warsaw Community High School was one of those schools, and the Unified program has been a better fit here than anyone could ever have imagined.
Warsaw has won two state championships in Unified Track and Field, but if all you see are the two championship banners in the Tiger Den, you are totally missing the point.
I was able to attend an assembly at the high school recently. It was for freshmen and sophomores, and its purpose was to introduce them to the Unified program at WCHS and recruit new kids to participate.
The IHSAA sent a graduate from Noblesville High School who had been on their Unified team to address the students, and his message was powerful.
Mitch Bonar told the roughly 1,000 students in the Performing Arts Center that, from the time he was a little boy, he just wanted to run and jump and play sports like the other athletes. He wanted to be a Miller (NHS’ school nickname)! But he was NOT like the other athletes. He technically wasn’t an athlete at all … until those kids in that room came up with the concept of Unified Sports, that is.
Bonar told a full-but-completely silent PAC that all he ever wanted to do was compete under his school’s colors, and Unified Sports allowed him to do that. It opened the door for him to compete for real state championships and real medals, and more than that it opened the eyes of the other kids in his school.
Bonar said that from the moment he was identified in the hallways at Noblesville as a member of the Unified team, his school mates started treating him differently. They showed him respect. They knew when the next Unified event was and they wished him well in advance of it.
For Bonar, that was a win all its own.
He told the Warsaw students how much they stood to gain from participating with these special athletes on the same field of competition.
They were listening.
It’s now called “Champions Together,” but its goal is unwavering: to get kids for whom sports come easy to sacrifice their time to participate alongside kids for whom very little comes easy.
If you have a child or grandchild who is a freshmen or a sophomore at the high school, you might ask them about what they heard that day, and how it impacted them.
There are a lot of championship banners hanging from the rafters of the Tiger Den, and the wall on the west end of the lower level is reserved for the school’s state champions. The banners for Warsaw’s two girls basketball state titles, the boys basketball state championship, the boys golf and softball state titles are side-by-side with the two Unified State Track and Field championships.
Those Unified banners look exactly the same as the others – bright orange with white lettering trimmed in black.
That’s exactly what the kids in that IHSAA board room a few years ago envisioned … and all the students they were thinking of ever wanted to begin with.
