Sandia Prep students participate in Adaptive Sports day

Apr. 26—One by one, middle school students at Sandia Prep filed into the gym Thursday afternoon, all of them with the unmistakable look of excitement in their eyes.

These students were getting ready to participate in the school's first-ever Adaptive Sports day. Over the course of the next two hours, they were going to try their hands at five sports played by Paralympic athletes the world over.

The goal of the event was to give those in the general student body a new perspective on what athletes with disabilities go through in order to play these sports and to help them become advocates for these athletes.

Being an advocate for those with disabilities has a special meaning for Travis Davis, 36. Born with cerebral palsy, he never has allowed it to define him. Growing up, he wanted to participant in sports like his fellow classmates, so he decided to join the wheelchair basketball team at Carrie Tingley Hospital, where he was a patient.

"It was great because I had never experienced any type of team sport, and this offered us an opportunity to play in front of crowds, to be competitive and do something that the average person thinks people with disabilities couldn't do," he said.

Davis played on the hospital's wheelchair basketball team for five years and said those experiences inspired him to spread awareness about adaptive sports and what disabled athletes go through in order to play sports.

Davis has given disability awareness talks on social inclusion awareness and education throughout his life, which included a TEDx talk in 2015 that focused on inclusion through education.

Davis also has worked as a substitute teacher at several schools around the city. One of those schools was Sandia Prep, where he also helped organize a wheelchair basketball tournament between Sandia Prep, Bosque School and Albuquerque Academy and gave numerous talks about disabilities and inclusion to Sandia Prep students during assemblies.

After one of his presentations to middle school students about adaptive sports, some students came up to Davis to learn more. This caught the eye of Susi Hochrein, the assistant head of school for middle school at Sandia Prep.

"And this started a conversation about the need to have an annual event to support adaptive sports," Hochrein said.

Hochrein and Davis began having conversations in November about hosting an adaptive sports day event for the students, in order to give them firsthand exposure to the type of sports athletes with disabilities play.

Those conversations soon expanded to include Tori Shiver, an assistant professor in physical education and teacher education at the University of New Mexico. Davis, who spoke at a graduate program meeting at UNM, talked about the idea of hosting an adaptive sports day at Sandia Prep.

"We do physical education and adaptive work, so there was a good connection for us to have, so we came out and met with Susi and Travis to help put together all of the events," Shiver said.

After the conversations with Hochrein and Davis, Shiver enlisted the help of eight graduate and eight undergraduate students from UNM's physical education program to come to Sandia Prep to run Thursday's event.

The group began to brainstorm and decided to look at Paralympic sports for which they could get the proper equipment and which then felt would be easy to involve students. They decided to feature five — goal ball, boccia, sitting volleyball, a partner run/walk and wheelchair basketball. Students would rotate through each sport during timed intervals.

While most of the sports involved fairly typical equipment, such as a volleyball set or kickball, wheelchairs are a different requirement. Sandia Prep reached out to Helen Pino and the Carrie Tingley Hospital Foundation. Pino, who is the foundation's program manager at the Carrie Tingley Hospital Foundation, arranged to have 25 specialized wheelchairs — with slanted wheels to avoid striking the hands of other players — brought to Sandia Prep on Thursday for wheelchair basketball.

" I told them I would love to be a part of this day," Pino said. "Kids need to have an understanding of what life is like for kids with special needs and to be advocates for those kids."

Eighth grader Emily Collins took Pino's messaging to heart. "Just because you have something that makes you different doesn't mean you can't do what other people do," she said.

The theme of advocacy is what originally inspired this idea and as Davis watched it play out firsthand after months of planning, he was hopeful the Sandia Prep event would have a lasting impact on the students.

"It's a really great learning experience, and they can build off it. And in the months and years to come, they can get more involved in adaptive sports, special education or other areas of disabilities that really need more advocates," he said.