Students and community members opened their eyes to the world of adaptive sports on Saturday, designed to include the disabled population in physical activity.
There were no limitations Saturday afternoon as a line began to form of students and alumni of all diversities and disabilities waiting to play in a game of wheelchair basketball.
MSU’s first Adaptive Sports Day held at IM Sports-Circle allowed the Council of Students with Disabilities to raise awareness about the disabled community.
Participants of the event were encouraged to join in adaptive tennis, adaptive basketball, goal ball — a sport designed for the blind — adaptive rowing, adaptive bocce ball and cycling, along with cycling for the blind.
Adaptive bicycles for the event were donated by Programs to Educate All Cyclists, a nonprofit organization based out of Ypsilanti, designed to assist disabled adults and youth in learning fundamentals to bicycle riding.
“We don’t discriminate. Anyone is welcome to ride. And we work on getting them to get to their least adaptive bike possible,” PEAC Summer Program Director Joe Altizer said. “Cycling is a unique opportunity for families with kids with disabilities because it’s a recreational activity that the entire family can do which is really rare for many of our students.”
Piotr Pasik, a disabled alumnus, said he attended to help raise awareness for the importance of adaptive sports, which can have an impact on young disabled people.
“The physical disabled population that doesn’t participate in sports growing up don’t get social and physical benefits of playing sports,” he said.
For the majority of the disabled community, adaptive sports benefit mental health more than physical.
“They provide outlets for regular physical exercise. Physical exercise has a great impact on mental health and emotional well-being. It promotes a sense of accomplishment of setting and achieving goals,” instructor for disabled studies Duncan Wyeth said.
Born with cerebral palsy, Wyeth doesn’t know life without disabilities.
“Early in life, my parents gave me a bike with training wheels, allowing me to keep up with playmates,” Wyeth said.
Wyeth used cycling to his advantage and competed in Seoul, South Korea, in the 1988 Paralympics games followed by Barcelona in 1992.
For many individuals with physical disabilities, mobility is limited, Wyeth said.
“A bike or a trike helps students cover considerable distance,” he added.
Embracing adaptive sports also encourages individuals to become apiece to a larger puzzle also allowing disabled individuals to identify with peers.
Altizer said adaptive cycling is also used as a recreational therapy growing into a functional tool.
“They get to talk to other kids with similar disabilities or a different type of disability they get to interact with,” he said. “Our older students as they move forward and through the program, start using the bicycle to get to work because they won’t usually be able to get a license or a car.”
Another sport highlighted, adaptive basketball, transforms traditional basketball into an entirely new game.
The biggest difference is the inability to use legs, the two-touch rule and the shooting positioning underneath the basket, said international relations junior Julia Christensen
“On the one hand getting people involved in adapted sports is good because it gives you a conception on what it’s like,” Christensen said. “On the flipside, such massive limitations aren’t as limiting as you think they are.”
As the representative for ASMSU on the CSD Board, Christensen said people who are aware of disabilities become “natural advocates.”
“It’s important for people to realize a disabled person can do something everyone else can do,” she said. “They just have to do it in a different way.”
