By: Rebecca Phillips

Collaboration and kindness combine in Bethel High School’s Unified Sports Team! Unified sports is where student athletes who have special needs and students without special needs come together to play unified in three sports over a course of the whole school year.

During the fall season, Bethel High School’s Unified Sports Team participated in soccer. During the winter the team will participate in basketball and track in the spring.

Unified sports is truly life changing. The students you meet along the way are amazing and inspiring — and the friendships made are truly priceless.

Marian Desmarais ‘18 states that, “Unified sports is a good way to interact with other students or teachers that you didn’t know about and learn your strengths and weakness in a sport…We are going to do basketball, we start in January.”

Unified sports is not about being the best at any given sport, but it is about being a partner with an athlete who has special needs and giving them the opportunity to participate in sports which they would not typically be able to do without the help of their peers.

Through unified sports, teams participate in events for the Special Olympics – and the motto of the Special Olympics is to ‘reveal the champion in all of us.’

The students of Bethel High School are being given the chance to try something truly unique and unlike anything they have done before. This just may be your call to action! It may seem scary to try to do something new and unfamiliar but as the unified sports motto says, “Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.”

All Bethel High students can join. Practices are Mondays from 2:15 p.m. to 3:15 p.m. in the gym.