Manchester Magazine manchester magazine fall 2019 for joomag | Page 23

MU | F e a t u r e s Mark Sherman ’79 is an accountant and a numbers man, but he requires no mental calculus to describe the hold Special Olympics has on him. “It’s just … the unbridled joy,” he says, readily. The unbridled joy of victory? Sure, there’s that. The unbridled joy Special Olympians derive from the simple, freeing exhilaration of competing? Even more so. The unbridled joy men like Sherman and women like Carol Fike ’10 experience by living their Church of the Brethren faith and the culture of service that is a hallmark of a Manchester University education? That, too. Sherman (pictured in inset at left), a financial advisor and tax accountant with Petry Wealth Management in Noblesville, Ind., is in his second term on the board of Special Olympics of Indiana. Fike (pictured at left), a special education teacher at DeKalb High School in Auburn, has been involved in Special Olympics even longer. A graduate with degrees in elementary and special education, she volunteered at a camp for adults with special needs when she was in eighth grade and volunteered at the 2004 USA Special Olympics Games in Iowa. “After those two things, I was hooked,” she says. Which is how she wound up as one of three coaches of a DeKalb County Special Olympics basketball team that, in July 2018, was touched by serendipity. “There were 10 athletes on the team, and we started training in August (2017),” says Fike, who had been volunteering with DeKalb County Special Olympics for six years. “At the time we started, the youngest (athlete) was 14, and the oldest was 32, I think.” None of them brought a wealth of experience to the table. The DeKalb County team was, in fact, the smallest, youngest and most inexperienced team entered in the USA Special Olympics Games in Seattle. So, of course, they wound up winning the whole thing. “Basically what happened is, we just ran around anyone who came across us,” Fike says. “Our team was crazy fast because we’d been running since October. So basically that was our plan. We just ran circles around them.” It was a pinnacle moment for a young woman who, like Sherman, drew her instinct for giving back from her faith and her school. “When I was in college I was part of the Student Education Association, and so every month we would go up and do an activity with the ARC clientele in Wabash,” Fike says. “Basically that was a chance to interact with adults with special needs and give them opportunities to do things they couldn’t otherwise do. And so that’s always been one of my goals in life, is just to give people opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise get. It’s just who I am and one of the reasons I still do what I do.” And so, eventually, he found himself serving on the board of a teen drug and alcohol program, a concern he was drawn to as a parent himself. When that went out of business, he was approached to serve on the Special Olympics board. Both the mission, and Sherman’s skill set, were a perfect fit. “I graduated from Manchester as an accounting major, spent several years in public accounting, then took a career path change that eventually landed me in several senior HR (human relations) roles,” Sherman says. “So I think the reason the boards I’ve been on have been interested in my skill set is because most nonprofits … have wonderful people who are all about the mission, but maybe not as many people who are about the operations of the organization, be that financial or HR.” And the reason Sherman has been interested in serving? Same as Fike. His background. His upbringing. And, of course, what he sees on the faces of all those Special Olympians, and that Fike saw in hers as they ran circles around everyone in Seattle. Unbridled joy. By Benjamin Smith Sherman followed a similar path. As a young man growing up in the Church of the Brethren in Fort Wayne, he remembers his parents talking about the way they served others. It was an ethos he simply grew up around, both at home and at Manchester, where his parents also had gone. “The idea of service was learned around the dinner table, acted out by my parents and certainly supported by Manchester,” Sherman says. Manchester | 23