Step Up For Disabilities

9/19/20 - Special Pops Unified Partner Training

For my second Disability Awareness event for my Gold Award, I was able to get my school club, Play Unified, to partner with Special Pops for their 2020 Fall Tennis Classic. Special Populations Tennis is an adaptive tennis program for children and adults with intellectual disabilities. Despite COVID 19, Special Pops wanted to hold a tournament to get their athletes out to play tennis! Special Pops needed around 50 volunteers to make the event happen, so my club agreed to partner with them to recruit students at my school to serve as the needed volunteers. This one-on-one interaction and involvement would be a great way to increase student awareness and acceptance for people with disabilities.

There are many roles that students from my school could volunteer for, such as ball person, umpire, set-up, etc, but the most important role is to be a tennis doubles partner with one of the Special Pops athletes. However, to serve in this role, training is required. I organized a training clinic for students at my school that wanted to serve as a tennis partner or "unified partner" with the special pops athlete. Mr. Hamm, the executive director at Special Pops led a training clinic on Saturday, September 19 for the students that wanted to train for this volunteer role. For the first half hour of the clinic, he explained the many different sizes of courts and different ball compression levels for each skill level of play for the Special Pops athletes. The age ranges of the athletes is from 8-60 years old! Most of their athletes go on to play in the Special Olympics of Georgia games. After he explained the basics to us, we spent an hour on the court where he demonstrated with us how everything would work during match play as a partner.

The most important lessons from the clinic were that the role as a partner was to facilitate the match and that our success as a unified partner will occur when the outcome of a point or match is determined by the quality and effort of the athlete...not by us, as the partners. Many thanks to Mr. Hamm for spending his Saturday morning with us!! We are excited about participating in the tournament next month!