Special people

As an interlude to the vacation stories, I wanted to write about my activities this evening. Tonight, I taught special people how to play ultimate. By "special", I mean developmentally disabled, but "special" is faster to type. I think it's nicer, too.

A member of our league works for the city and runs evening activities for special people twice a week. She struggles to find new things for them to do, and thought that a demo of ultimate would be interesting and new for them. We had short notice for tonight's event, so we were only able to get seven volunteers out, but it was enough. We set up a small field beside the rec centre where the special people meet, and they watched us play 3-on-3 for about 20 minutes. Our seventh, gregarious volunteer commentated as we played, explaining some of the basics of the game as we demonstrated. He also described one team as "good" and the other team as "evil", which made them more interested in the outcome of the game. Interestingly, they also associated "Oilers" with "good" and "Flames" with "evil", so the two terms for each team were used interchangeably. Once it got a bit darker, we stopped playing and demonstrated some specific throws, like the hammer, the scoober, the thru-the-legs throw. We also threw some hucks and did some layouts.

After awhile, their attention started to wander, so we let the special people throw the discs themselves. I was a little worried that someone would get hurt, since it was fairly dark out by then and there were 40 or so special people milling around, throwing things. In the end, most of the volunteers worked with groups of special people, throwing with them and teaching them to catch. They seemed to really enjoy it and were very well behaved - nothing crazy happened! I threw the disc with 4 people, teaching them how to catch the disc like a pancake. Some of the men could really throw the disc! I had to make sure I didn't get beaned when they threw. Once it was 8pm, they all went inside to swim in the pool and we packed up our stuff to head home. I felt like the whole demo went really well and the special people seemed so happy and interested (for the most part - their attention span wasn't huge), so I'm glad we were able to get enough people out for it.