Suzanne Ivans and her husband, Steve, always spoke to their son Noah as they would his older brother, Matthew. They insisted his speech was grammatically correct, used the biggest vocabulary words and, despite the fact that he was legally blind, encouraged their tall and potentially athletic boy to play sports.
But learning disabilities landed Noah in a special education classroom, his poor vision meant he was in adaptive P.E., and at lunch and recess, he was bullied by the "other kids," who did not understand him and apparently did not want to try. As a result, Suzanne lamented the place where so many special-needs kids find themselves: "He often felt he did not belong in either world."
Afraid of a lawsuit, his mother half-joked, coaches put Noah on his high school's JV basketball team; he participated in only a handful of plays as a senior.
"We just wanted them to support him," she said of Noah. "But nobody would warm up with him and he sat on the bench. It's hard anytime you see your child rejected."
Now 27, the man from Ringoes, N.J., will lead his Unified volleyball team -- made up of intellectually disabled athletes and their partners (non-disabled teammates) -- at the Special Olympics World Games, which will take place in Los Angeles from July 25 to Aug. 2.
"I just enjoy Unified," Noah said of the movement that includes approximately 820,000 participants worldwide and will be represented in 13 of the 25 sports competitions in L.A. "It's probably more challenging in the sense that the competition is a little harder and you have diverse people who play it."
More than that, Suzanne said simply, "It opens up new worlds for him."
Changing people's perceptions
The words of Special Olympics founder Eunice Shriver still reverberate in Beau Doherty's ears.
Doherty, considered the "Godfather of Unified Sports" by those in the know, had been working in the Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services in the mid-'70s, when "inclusion" was the new buzzword. For those with intellectual disabilities, it meant a gradual movement from institutions into communities and classrooms. Doherty said many people were against it.
More frustrating to him -- even the one arena seemingly most in touch with the special-needs community wasn't quite getting it right.
"At that time in Special Olympics," Doherty recalled, "if you went to our Games, you'd sometimes have clowns at the finish lines; officials weren't trained. Quite frankly, in my early years, the coaches wouldn't even put forth an effort."
Shriver, whose Camp Shriver evolved into the Special Olympics in 1968, didn't like it either. In 1979, she gathered a group that included Doherty and made it clear that it wouldn't continue.
"She said, 'Listen, I didn't start this to be a carnival; I started it to be a sports program,'" Doherty said. "And if people didn't fall in line, they were not there the next year, I will tell you that."
Doherty's next meeting with Shriver came in 1983. By having Boston-area college kids participate with his Special Olympics athletes, Doherty discovered that while coaches had become accustomed to sitting on the sidelines, barking a few orders and going home, there was now a lot more mingling going on.
"It became very clear to me that Special Olympics had the best ability of any organization in the world at that point to change people's perceptions," Doherty said. "And if we made the change to include non-disabled people onto teams, it would be the magic formula to change the world."
That magic formula took a while to fully catch on, but Unified Sports are now at the heart of the Special Olympics. Its mission statement: to promote social inclusion through shared training and competition on the athletic field.
Doherty can chuckle now at the growing pains Unified Sports have endured.
Shriver's hesitation, he said, was that she had created Special Olympics for the athletes and did not want the partners taking the limelight. In 1984, she attended a softball tournament that was experimenting with the Unified concept; the first thing she saw was the second baseman jumping in front of another player to cleanly field a ground ball.
"So she comes up and starts yelling at me, 'See!'" Doherty recalled. "And I said, 'Mrs. Shriver, the second baseman is a Special Olympics athlete.'"
Shriver soon after hired a Harvard consultant to do research on the inclusionary concept in sports. And thanks to an impassioned speech by Doherty, who made his case that Special Olympics would soon be outdated without Unified Sports, Shriver gave the go-ahead to find four states to participate to see how it worked.
"She said, 'OK, now everybody leave the room except Beau,'" he recalled. "Then she closed the door, and with a big grin, she said, 'You're lucky you're from Massachusetts.'"
In 1989, at a global gathering of Special Olympics officials, Special Olympics Unified Sports was officially introduced. The movement gained further momentum with Project Unify, a program funded by the U.S. Department of Education in 2008 that encouraged school communities to follow the model of the Special Olympics and promote the same integrated principles.
In the 2014-15 school year, Project Unify was offered in over 3,100 schools across 44 state programs with an estimated 95,000 school-aged athletes and partners. The goal is to reach 5,000 Project Unify schools in the U.S. by the end of the 2015-16 school year.
'You learn to trust each other'
It is a distinction that can be easily misunderstood.
Athletes and partners.
While partners are there to help the athletes -- paired together by age and ability -- it is often hard to distinguish between the two groups.
"Honestly, there's not much difference between my high school team and my Unified team," said Haley Eckel, a sophomore on the Land O' Lakes (Fla.) High School girls soccer team and a partner on the USA Unified soccer team from Florida that will compete at the World Games. "You want to push your [school] teammates just like you push [Special Olympics] athletes to do their best. And they do the same with us."
Their coach, Vicky King, who also coaches soccer and teaches P.E. at Land O' Lakes, said without hesitation, "I don't coach my teams any differently. I coach them as soccer players. I love the sport and I'm trying to teach them to love it."
The goal with all Unified teams goes beyond love of the game; it is also about supporting teammates with an all-for-one attitude that spreads from the playing field to school hallways to postgame get-togethers.
"We all support each other, we all have each other's back. We stick with each other no matter how bad times get. Once you start playing [Unified Sports], your self-confidence starts building and building and you're not scared to talk to anybody anymore. That's what amazes me." Christopher Hale, a member of the USA Unified soccer team
"We find once they become friends on the field, they take that into the classroom [and community]," said Nip Ho, vice president of area services for Special Olympics Hawaii and a member of the management team overseeing the U.S. bocce squad for the World Games.
Among school-age participants, the benefits of Unified Sports are easy to see, Ho said.
"When the cool kids in school hang out with [students in special-education classes], it has a huge impact on the whole student body," she said. "Now the special ed students are involved in school assemblies and they're getting just as much applause."
For athletes like Christopher Hale, a 20-year-old member of the USA Unified soccer team, acceptance for him now goes beyond school to the genuine bonds he said have formed between teammates.
"We all support each other, we all have each other's back. We stick with each other no matter how bad times get," he said. "Once you start playing [Unified Sports], your self-confidence starts building and building and you're not scared to talk to anybody anymore. That's what amazes me.
"A lot of my partners have made a heck of an impact on me. I was always shy around other people and I don't like to speak out much. But they sit with me, and I can open up about how life has been, the ups and downs, how soccer takes away our troubles. I don't have to worry about clamping up."
Mindy Watrous, CEO of Special Olympics Colorado, talks about the "even playing field" that is Unified Sports.
"You can put a kid in a [mainstream] classroom, but if they're not interacting, that's not inclusion," said Watrous, whose brother is a Special Olympics athlete. "This is, 'We're going to play on the same team with equal partners.' So many kids are afraid of people with disabilities and don't know how to approach them. This breaks down barriers."
Watrous also refers to a University of Massachusetts-Boston study that shows how 84 percent of the athletes and partners involved in Unified Sports call it "life-changing."
"That speaks to, it's not just nice, it's not just fine, but it's critically important," she said.
Traveling to Indianapolis for the Team USA Special Olympics training camp last fall marked the first time many athletes had left home. But rooming with partners on their team was an experience that provided both comfort and a positive impression for everyone involved.
"The first few days of the trip, my roommate was super-excited, but the last two or three days he was getting really homesick," said Kyle Townsend, a senior at Land O' Lakes High School and a partner on the Florida team. "I needed to spend more time with him to make him feel he was with family, that we're his family, too. I wanted him to know that's it's normal when you've never left home to feel like that, and that if he was down, he could talk to me or any of us.
"We weren't so close before [training camp] because he was new to the team, but you learn a lot about someone when you're in the same room for five or six days. You learn to trust each other."
Building a community
Not all athletes and partners start out as strangers.
Because of her brother Ben, Sarah Barnhart became a Unified partner on his Special Olympics teams, and he is why she campaigned for a year to get Project Unify into their highly competitive and huge Colorado high school.
By the third year of the program, Ben's Unified basketball games were drawing crowds almost as large as the varsity contests, and a girl with intellectual disabilities was voted Homecoming Queen.
When Sarah was 9, however, it was simply a way for her to do something out of the house with Ben, who is a year younger. The two were part of swimming and basketball teams before learning golf, which Sarah would continue playing in high school.
"I think it helped me gain a little perspective and humility," she said of serving as a Unified partner on Ben's teams. "As a kid, it was hard for me to understand my brother's disability in a lot of ways. It was confusing. So to be on the team with other kids like him and other partners sharing the same experience, it was a convenient way to build a community."
It also gave the siblings a way to connect -- "a way to breathe," said Sarah -- away from their relationship at home.
"All siblings feud in the house, but when you're on a team, you're going for the same goals," she said.
"Ever since we started in Special Olympics together," Ben said, "it got us to be nicer to each other."
In the process, their roles shifted.
"In a lot of ways, I was typically the one in the spotlight, and this was a way to put him in the spotlight and it made him excited, too," Sarah said. "I realized how much I liked to see him succeed. It brought out a good side of him, a happy, social side.
"He naturally started taking a leadership role I had never seen him do until we started playing Unified Sports together. And on the court, I'd see him passing the ball off, not because he was scared to take a shot, but because he wanted to give another athlete a chance. I really started to see his generous side."
In high school, the boy who was once bullied and only ate lunch with the kids in his special education classes in the cafeteria, was now going out to lunch with kids from his Unified team who suddenly realized, as his sister said, "he was really fun to hang out with."
Simultaneously, Sarah said, they both developed.
"I matured a crazy amount alongside Ben doing all these sports together," she said. "All the normal ways a 9-year-old matures into a high school senior, but I also developed a level of patience with him I wouldn't have necessarily had before and just in general."
Ben admitted, "It was hard when Sarah went off to college." But the siblings say they text and call each other all the time.
"Siblings can naturally be friends, but you don't always like them," said Sarah, who just finished her sophomore year at Northeastern University and hopes to become a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner. "But we gained genuine interests together and act more as a team now, a singular unit. If something is up with him, I'm curious and want to help him fix it, and he is the same with me. We're in it together."
So too are the father-son duos of Joe Volpert, 74, and Jim, 33, of Papillion, Nebraska, and their teammates and frequent roommates Alan Gustafson, 77, and Alec, 44, of Bend, Oregon, who will represent the U.S. at the World Games on the Unified bocce team.
For both dads, the Special Olympics and Unified Sports have been a way of bonding with their sons.
"It has made me feel really good because I've been able to do something with him just like with the other kids," said Joe Volpert, who also has two older sons. "It wasn't one of those deals where the, quote, normal kids do something and shun him.
"Unified brings out the best in both of us and it helps both of us. I don't want to say we've become closer because we are close. But we enjoy ourselves, and it's fun for me to have watched him grow in the various sports. I think it has made me a better person."
Alan Gustafson, like Volpert a retired engineer, often lets his son take the lead.
"Alec lets me know when we have practice, and he knows all the rules," Gustafson said. "He keeps me in line. He'll say 'Dad, watch the foul line. Don't step in the court.' He's very competitive. He's got that gene."
"Sometimes," Alec said, "he does something the opposite way. But we work as a team."
Gustafson speaks with particular pride about Alec's sportsmanship award at the state games.
"He makes the whole family very proud," he said of his son. "When we found out he had special needs, they said he'd never ride a bicycle. Well, he rode a bike at a younger age than both his brother and sister and was toilet-trained before them, too. You never know what a child can do."
Life greater than sports
Manny Parrish considers Abel Mehari one of his best friends. The two self-proclaimed gym rats met in high school after Mehari moved to Manny's hometown outside Minneapolis.
The bond was immediate.
Manny's father, James, coached the local Special Olympics Unified basketball team, and Manny was a partner. After Mehari tried out but failed to make the sophomore team and was made team manager, Manny suggested he go out for the Unified team.
"In basketball, you have guys who are good ball handlers and others, like Abel, who can shoot the lights out," said Manny, now 24. "Abel might not be the best dribbler, but as the point guard, I can get him the ball when he's open and all he has to do is shoot. It's really fun.
"Now you're giving someone an opportunity who may not have made his high school team [Abel did make the junior varsity squad] but has a passion for the sport. It's problem-solving, and it's being part of a real team."
Their Minnesota team will compete in the World Games, and this fall, Abel will attend the University of Minnesota, where he will major in journalism. As for Manny, who works for his local YMCA and is the father of a 1-year-old son, being a Unified partner has changed him for the better.
"I was a basketball workaholic," he said. "I'm so competitive, it was pretty much win or go home with me. But I think I've learned compassion and how to talk with people. I've learned how to have people trust me and how to develop that trust and how to have fun again. My dad says I seem so much happier now.
"Our guys want to win, but this is so not about winning. They all have my [phone] number and we all hang out. We had practice last week and I brought my son, and we talked about family and joked around. It's about playing the sport we love and being competitive, but still being treated as equals."
Dream becomes reality
Doherty calls it "the endgame," and he mists up when he talks about it.
It is the 15-year-old girl invited to her first sleepover by a friend on her team; it is the gang of kids jumping on top of each other in a huddle and not being able to tell who is disabled and who is not; it is the Special Olympics athletes standing up at weddings for their Unified partners; and the simple gesture of grabbing pizza or a movie together after practice.
Relationships that begin on the youth level through Unified Sports in schools and via Special Olympics extend through high school to adulthood. Long-term bonds are formed.
And few things make Doherty happier.
"That was the hope in the early days," he said. "And it was true, it happened."