NJSIAA, Special Olympics team up for new initiative
Washington Township High School quarterback Mike Piperno passed for 1,563 yards and 17 touchdowns last season. But he's not the only Minuteman with a good arm.
Washington Township High School quarterback Mike Piperno passed for 1,563 yards and 17 touchdowns last season.
But he's not the only Minuteman with a good arm.
"A couple of these kids could really throw," Piperno said of participants in a Project Unify clinic on Wednesday. "I was getting nervous for my [starting quarterback] spot."
Piperno and fellow juniors Austin Hacking and Ryan Brady led the way as about 50 football players teamed with schoolmates with and without disabilities in a clinic designed to teach youngsters about passing, catching, and taking handoffs.
Not that those football skills were anywhere close to the top of the list of lessons learned by every student in the school's 11-12 gymnasium.
"It's all about acceptance," Washington Township coach Mark Wechter said. "Football will fade away, no matter how good you are. What are you learning that will stay with you with the rest of your life?"
Serendipitously, Washington Township's clinic occurred the same day the New Jersey Interscholastic Athletic Association announced a partnership with Special Olympics New Jersey to create and promote Unified Sports programs at high schools across the state.
SONJ will provide the funding for the NJSIAA to hire a full-time staff member to coordinate the project and also will issue grants of up to $75,000 for three years for schools to develop Unified teams.
Unified Sports joins together athletes with and without disabilities of comparable age and ability to compete against similar squads.
"It's win-win," NJSIAA executive director Steve Timko said of the partnership. "This is a great and big deal for New Jersey athletics."
Timko said the NJSIAA will oversee the development of Unified Sports at the state's high schools, providing official sanction and support as well as championship facilities.
SONJ's grant money will pay for equipment, supplies, facility rental, transportation, and coaching stipends, clearing the way for the schools to embrace this worthwhile initiative.
The plan is for high schools to create Unified five-on-five soccer, basketball, and track teams during the 2016-17 school year, with an eye toward adding more sports in the future.
"This is going to grow and grow," Timko predicted.
Washington Township's event, the NJSIAA's partnership announcement - they both underscored the transformative power of sports, the ability of these games to serve as a platform for so much more than displaying skills and keeping score.
Wechter noted - as has every coach who ever has encouraged his athletes to get involved in these types of projects - that general-education students benefit as much if not more than special-needs students from the interaction.
"Some of our kids can be a little meat-headish," Wechter said of his football players. "They develop so many social skills and learn to be school leaders."
Piperno said the experience was "really special for me."
Hacking, a top linebacker and tackle, talked of "making friends that I didn't know before that I'll see all the time now in school."
Wechter said that special-needs students often are "self-contained" within a district and that events such as Project Unify - and the NJSIAA's new Unified Sports partnership - serve to "bridge the gap" between segregated segments of the school population.
Piperno isn't really worried about his starting job. The 6-foot-3 athlete led the Minutemen to a share of the West Jersey Football League American Division title as well as a South Jersey Group 5 playoff berth as a junior, and he will enter his senior season as one of the area's top quarterbacks.
But that stuff tends to shrivel in significance when athletes, coaches, and everyone else involved with these sports begins to realize the impact they can make, right in the hallways of their own school.
@PhilAnastasia
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