After School Matters partnered with the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and the Chicago Park District to offer their first ever adaptive sports camp. Right now it’s a pilot program, but the hope is to expand this offering to more teenagers in the future. NBC 5’s LeeAnn Trotter reports.
A small group of Chicago Public Schools students spent their spring break vacation at the After School Matters Adaptive Sports Camp at Rainbow Beach Park where they focused on wheelchair basketball and learned how to ride hand-pedal bikes.
Half of the participants have physical disabilities, while the other half are able-bodied and have never played wheelchair basketball.
"I like teaching them," said Alexander McGuire, who has been playing for nine years and wants to be a Paralympian one day. "It’s just something new for some people. It’s just I like teaching others how to play sports that they don’t normally know how to."
"For our able-bodied counterparts, now you all can see what it’s like to be in a wheelchair," said Ryan Juguan, HR partner at After School Matters and the visionary behind the camp. "Adaptive sports positively impacted me where I got my education, and I knew that there was an opportunity to develop this program."
Student DesAre Pope said she signed up because she wanted to learn something new.
"It was challenging because, I mean, I always see people do it, but I never understood how they did it," Pope said. "So when I got to get the mechanics myself, it was weird at first, but I got used to it."
While this is After School Matters' first foray into adaptive sports, the Chicago Park District has been offering programs for 15 years, said Larry Labiak, disability policy officer for the Chicago Park District.
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"There are so many youngsters with a primary physical disability in and around the city of Chicago that have not been exposed to adaptive sports, or Paralympic sports as we sometimes call it, or wheelchair sports, and we need to get the word out to these youngsters."
Two-time Paralympian Kelsey LeFevour, who now works for Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, grew up with a disability and wishes she had been exposed to adaptive sports as a teenager.
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"I think about how cool I would have thought this would have been to have been in a gym, playing sports, doing something competitive with peers and feeling like I could authentically participate in that," LeFevour said.
Juguan hopes After School Matters offers more programs like this in the future.
