Experience of a lifetime
Lincoln’s Carlson enjoys coaching RI Special Olympians in Seattle
LINCOLN – As head coach of Team Rhode Island’s co-ed track and field squad, Sue Carlson didn’t know what to expect from her athletes when they flew to the Special Olympics USA Games at the University of Washington oval Seattle.
The reasons: She only knew one of the four tracksters personally, she being Marina Temple of Bristol. Carlson, who had taught special education and various sports at Mount Hope High School for 30-plus years, wasn’t at all familiar with Kelsey Kriner
(27) of Newport, Antonio Piccirillo (21) of Johnston and Nick Caprio (24) of Cranston.
“I was mostly concerned with their conditioning,” Carlson, also the veteran girls’ cross-country and track chief at her alma mater, Lincoln High. “But I will say this: When it was all over, they pleasantly surprised me.”
She indicated Temple won a bronze medal in the long jump, took fourth in the 200 meters and fifth in the 400 meters before joining her three teammates on the triumphant 4 x 400 relay, which happened to clock a season-best time of 5:29.18.
“Our seed time had been 6:04, so the relay, I’ll tell you, stunned me,” Carlson noted upon her return to southeastern New England. “I was fearful that the girls were going to have trouble running back-to-back 400s. As the schedule went, the girls were supposed to run their (individual) 400 at 1 p.m. one day, but they didn’t compete until closer to 1:20-1:30.
“I was worried because the relay was supposed to go off shortly after 2, and that would give Marina and Kelsey very little recovery time,” she added. “I thought they were going to have a difficult time. We had trained two days a week through the spring, but as we got closer to the Special Olympics, we upped it to three.
“The good news, though, was they put all that hard training to work for them, and it paid off. That back-toback schedule I know gave them some anxiety during the late winter, spring and early summer months, because I felt the same way. Plus they were used to competing at the shorter distances, the 100 and 200.
“But they definitely did better than I thought they would. When I look back at what their seeds were, they all had PR performances, except for Antonio and Nick in the guys’ 200. That (event) came on the first day of the competition, and I think the guys went out to conservatively.”
Here’s where Carlson’s premier coaching ability provided a boost to her athletes.
“I told both of them, ‘If you’re trying to conserve energy for your other events, you’re mistaken; this is not the place to do it,’” she stated. “I also said, ‘This is the national Special Olympics; this is the real deal, so you’ve got to give it everything you’ve got ALL the time.’”
The group understood. “After that, every one of them had at least one PR,” she laughed.
Her favorite moment of her first-ever trip to a national SO event came in that relay, the one that snatched the gold medal.
“We were running in second place behind a team of all boys (from Arkansas),” she said. “We were competing against three other teams (the others from host state Washington and Indiana). Once we got to the fourth leg, Antonio was behind the leader by about 100 yards; the (Arkansas) anchor had gone out really slow.
“Antonio actually picked up his pace and began eying him, then passed him at the 200-meter mark; it was a race to the tape,” she continued. “We won it by two or three seconds, so what Antonio did was so spectacular, it brought tears to my eyes. They worked so hard to get to this point, so to see them succeed, it was beyond words.”
Collectively, Carlson’s crew collected four medals, so she called it a most satisfying trip.
Truth be told, this was nothing new for Carlson, who was a standout student-athlete at Lincoln High School in the late 1970s before earning a Bachelor’s of Elementary Education/Special Education from Rhode Island College in 1982.
She began teaching and coaching in Lincoln, but soon found herself at then-Bristol High School. (Bristol and Warren highs merged over two decades ago into Mount Hope). She’s been there ever since.
“I’ve been coaching Special Olympics since 1986, so – yes – I’ve seen a lot,” she recalled. “That’s when I got hired as a special-ed teacher at Bristol, and there were a group of parents interested in forming a Special Olympic team. Back then, we weren’t yet regionalized, so we as teachers shared kids from both.
“I remember myself and three other physical-education teachers with adaptive certification came together to form a plan and get the program off the ground,” she added.” We served kids from about age eight all the way to whatever, and the Special Olympics community still does that for competitors.
“Five or six parents really took the bull by the horns and helped us get it on track. Beforehand, there really wasn’t anything for them. They weren’t yet any sports, only varsity and intramural, and they didn’t compete in either. Back then, I think it was because those kids relied so heavily on transportation. They weren’t staying late after school and taking the late bus home.
“They were relying on their parents or other caretakers to pick them up. Once we got it going, it was so great to see all the special athletes become involved in sports. That was a door being opened for them, and it led to the Unified Basketball, Volleyball and other high school sports we have now.”
As for Carlson herself, the only other time she had attended any other mammoth Special Olympics competition came way back in 1999, when she attended the World Games in Chapel Hill, N.C.
“I was one of two coaches for the track & field team; I guess you could call me the head coach for girls, and we had fun,” she said. When asked how her kids did at the event, she laughed, “I have no idea! I don’t remember; it was so long ago!”
She did recall there were three males and three females on the club, with her tutoring the gals and a man leading the boys.
“This time, I had four athletes and it was just me, so this was more of a challenge,” she admitted. “When I went the first time, I was with younger kids; I mean, they were still in high school. This group, they were all between 21 and 27, and they all won medals, which was nice.”
Outside of competing, the entire Team Rhode Island – consisting of 21 athletes, six partners and eight coaches in other sports like swimming, bowling, golf, Unified Basketball and powerlifting – like the other 49 states and District of Columbia were given a free day to explore nearby Seattle.
“I had never been out there before, and it was a beautiful place,” offered Carlson, a Pawtucket native. “We actually caught a decent week without much rain, but it was cooler than back here. We had one day where we were able to go off-campus, and we went to the city; we went to some big marketplace and looked at the restaurants and some of the historical sites, saw the big Ferris wheel. The ocean views were incredible.
“They also treated us to a Mariners-Angels game, which was a lot of fun. Overall, it was a fantastic experience for all the kids, regardless of sport.”