22
REFLECTION
OUR THOUGHTS
By trying out different adaptive sports and creating an adaptive sports magazine, our section successfully bridged the gap in understanding disability and adaptive sports. Both individual and community understanding were challenged and advanced, and such was evident through interviews and surveys. By performing interviews on participants, we received feedback on our section’s many adaptive sports trials. Each section participant gave a reflection on how their participation in adaptive sport impacted them, and we interviewed both observers and non-observers of our sports trials. Additionally, at the end of our electronic magazine which features the evaluations of each adaptive sport, there is a survey for those who have read the Magazine. Entitled, “Back to Brown,” this survey assesses readers’ background knowledge and interest in adaptive sport and how
these capacities changed after reading our magazine. It is
the hope that this survey can inform the next steps of our project, which would be implementation of adaptive sport at Brown.
WHAT WE
STRUGGLED
WITH
The great struggles that many of us went through to find out where we could participate in various adaptive sports demonstrated that to our surprise, adaptive sports were actually in many cases extremely inaccessible. For example, the sled hockey group called numerous ice rinks to see if sled hockey was played there, but most rinks had not even heard of it. They were only able to eventually become aware of a sled hockey practice by getting in touch with Northeast Passage, an organization over two hours away
in New Hampshire that works specifically with people with disabilities. Other groups, including power soccer, resorted
to Northeast Passage as well in order to find out where and when various adaptive sports were played. Wheelchair tennis faced
scheduling challenges as well,
and after a great deal of effort to figure out how they would be able to play, they were able to have a two-hour practice session. The amount of effort that was required to find out how to participate in adaptive sports was shocking to us and made us realize that adaptive sports are not nearly as commonplace as they should be. Most groups faced troubles in terms of finding practices and had to travel long distances to attend the practices. The rarity, in terms of both practice frequency and location, taught us that an expansion of adaptive sports’ availability is drastically needed.
Essentially, this project showed our section that adaptive sports are extremely inaccessible. While we were welcomed greatly once we found locals for playing our various sports, the process of finding the adaptive sports practices was long and tedious. Brown students are ignorant of sports for people with disabilities, but expressed interest in this topic. Our magazine, and adaptive sports trials, were important first steps in uncovering these problems and beginning to learn how to address them, but it is clear that we still have more learning to do and that many steps still need to be taken to increase the availability of adaptive sports at Brown and nationwide.