For the past decade, Gadsden City High School’s Special Olympics basketball team has had its special needs cheerleaders leading chants and bringing spirit to the court. However, for those 10 years, the cheerleaders remained on the sidelines.
This season, the program is growing in an exciting way as it marks the first year that the special needs cheerleaders at Gadsden City have formed a Unified Special Olympics squad. Unified is a division of competition in which at least 50% of the squad’s cheerleaders must be students with intellectual disabilities.
Special Education Teacher Emily Day has spent the last six years with the team. She took this year’s team a step further by pairing each girl with an intellectual disability with another girl who has a diagnosed disability, such as autism or hearing impairments.
“It’s been where we have seven girls who have intellectual disabilities and seven girls who have other diagnosed disabilities, plus our two seniors from varsity cheer who are helping to guide and lead us,” Day said.
The team is now formally a part of the Special Olympics and will have opportunities to compete at state, national, and world levels. In years past, boys on the basketball team would compete for medals while the girls on the squad remained at home. This season, however, the squad members will be able to attend their first state-sanctioned competition and compete for themselves.
“It’s a fantastic opportunity for students with disabilities to participate in something that they haven’t been able to participate in the past,” Day said. “Special Olympics in general gives students an opportunity to compete and to develop their social skills, their communication skills and all the things that we know team sports give to the average child. Special Olympics allows our individuals with intellectual disabilities to develop those same — we call them ‘soft skills’ in the world of employment — people skills.
“We have seen things like students who have very little verbal communication come and do Special Olympics cheer. And they speak more, they talk more, they enjoy the rhymes and the rhythms, and so it can open so many other doors for these students to experience and make jumps and leaps that they wouldn’t otherwise get to make.”
The girls then had to learn a new set of skills — all for the first time.
“Super excited that we got to get a squad together,” Day said. “We went to training in October and we were like, ‘OK, this is going to be a real cheer competition.’ The girls had to learn stunts for the first time, gymnastics for the first time, and dance for the first time, so it was challenging and fun.”
In January, the squad received a donation from Alabama Power’s Eastern Division that provided enough funds for new uniforms. Spencer Williams, Alabama Power’s community relations manager in Gadsden, was excited to see the funding go to such a deserving group of students.
“I was quite excited to support Gadsden City schools and this one-of-a-kind group of kids,” Williams said. “These students embody the spirit of this community. We also couldn’t be prouder of the sponsors and staff that are responsible for allowing them to shine their brightest.”
While the squad does fundraising, it mostly relies on donations from businesses to cover expenses.
“We are super excited for the donation from Alabama Power,” Day said. “A lot of time, our students — in particular those with intellectual disabilities and special needs — they live in group home situations. They don’t have money to put toward these kinds of sports and activities. If we don’t have businesses that come up and come alongside us and help, it would be impossible to provide the uniforms, the equipment, and especially the travel costs to go compete in these games.”
For more information about the Gadsden City Special Olympics teams, click here. To learn more about Alabama Power’s community outreach, click here.
Courtesy of Alabama News Center
