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.
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