BRIDGING THE GAP
Ability First Sports camp provides opportunities for physically disabled
DURHAM » Every year since 1985, Ability First Sports Camps has provided youth with physical disabilities the opportunity to go to a summer sports camp.
It is director Eric Snedeker’s belief that kids with physical disabilities often get lumped into camps that are more designed for kids with developmental disabilities rather than just physical disabilities, and he wanted to change that.
Snedeker designed a camp in which campers would learn a variety of sports including wheelchair rugby, wheelchair basketball, sit-ski water skiing and cycling.
The four-day camp ran Thursday through Sunday and began with check in and an opening ceremony at SkyLake Ranch in Durham, included skill practicing and scrimmages and meals provided by local Chico restaurants. It finished with a closing ceremony held at Chico High School.
In past years the camp has been held overnight with students staying in the dorms at Chico State. When the camp first started in 1985 there were about 15 campers. In the most recent overnight camps the numbers have grown to as many as 35-40 kids.
This year there were roughly 20 kids in attendance, which Snedeker said was a good number because of it being a day camp. Students came from primarily Butte and Glenn County, but some came from as far as Las Vegas, Idaho, Oregon, Eureka and San Diego. One parent arrived at the start of camp Thursday from Corning and said she had researched wheelchair basketball for her son and anticipated she would have to go to somewhere near Sacramento at least, but was excited to see Ability First’s roots in Chico.
Due to COVID-19 restrictions Snedeker designed what he called a hybrid camp in 2022, where students attended the camp from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. and returned the next day.
It was a return to camp for many who had attended in years past, after the camp was forced to be canceled in 2020 and 2021.
“I definitely like the overnight camps more because you can interact with friends more, like in the dorms and that part I definitely miss,” said camper Bailey Burkhart. “They will wake you up with loud music and stuff like that, it’s just super fun and that’s one part I do miss but it’s definitely better than nothing.”
Burkhart was attending the camp for her third year, first attending in 2018. She can walk 20% of the time, but is refined to her wheelchair most of the time.
Burkhart loves the adaptive waterskiing that the kids are able to do at the camp, where campers are inserted into a sit-ski and a rope is inserted into a notch of the ski. If campers have the ability to hold onto the rope, which many do, they can then pull the rope from the notch and hold on as the boat pulls them around the private lake at SkyLake Ranch.
Each camper when being towed on the waterski is followed by a jet ski with two people on board. The person on the back of the jet ski is called the “jumper,” and their job is to jump in the water when a camper lets go of the rope or falls in and then stabilize the camper.
“I didn’t even know I would be able to waterski or basketball or anything like that or rugby until I met Ability First,” Burkhart said. “It created a lot of opportunities for me, like when I went surfing a few years ago and I never thought I could do that.”
In addition to the campers, there are roughly 30 staff members, two nurses and 20 coaches who volunteer their time as well. Snedeker said many of the coaches hold world records in wheelchair sports.
Counselor Brooke Uribe, a special education teacher, first joined Ability First in 2007 as a recreation therapy student at Chico State. She loves what it offers to the community in terms of self advocacy and ways it lets one meet and socialize with others in a variety of sports.
“This bridges the gap between community and leisure,” Uribe said. “I think community integration and inclusions is really important and that’s something that I strive for with my students. Really trying to provide opportunities for them in the community not only for themselves but for the community as a whole.”
Abby Dunn, 19, is a former camper at Ability First and is now a basketball coach at the Ability First camps. She’s been working with Ability First for 5 ½ years and first started working with the programs eight months after she was diagnosed with a polio leg virus — a virus that paralyzed her legs. Dunn was a gymnast and a soccer player growing up and was recommended to Ability First by Shriners Hospital for Children following her injury.
Thanks in part to Ability First, Dunn was able to get a scholarship to the University of Arizona and she participates on the women’s wheelchair basketball team as well as the Wildcats’ adaptive track team. Dunn participates in the 100, 200, 400 and will be doing a 10k in October.
“It was incredibly important to find something like this and I wouldn’t be a college athlete without Ability First,” Dunn said. “It’s definitely helped me as an athlete. Its incredibly helpful for your mental and physical health as someone who is disabled — it helps everything.”
Dunn said she did not realize there were scholarships, collegiate or international levels of disabled sports before Ability First and it opened up a “whole new world.”
“I come back every summer because this summer I can help new athletes and also I just love the community that we have at Ability First,” Dunn said.
Snedeker, who originally worked with the adaptive PE program at Chico State for 13 years after originally wanting to be a physical therapist, says his favorite part of the camps is watching the excitement on kids’ faces when they realize they are able to compete in sport. He loves watching kids learn skills from professional coaches and bring it back to their communities, telling their PE teachers that they don’t want adaptive PE anymore.
He encourages PE teachers to let kids in wheelchairs play tennis but to get two bounces against an ablebodied person who gets one. People who play wheelchair basketball get two pushes on a wheelchair before they must bounce the ball or it is traveling, and the three-inthe-key rule is increased to five-in-the-key for those in a wheelchair due to limited lateral movement.
At Alpine Meadows in Lake Tahoe there is a Tahoe handicap ski program that the Ability First staff encourages.
“We teach these kids to advocate for themselves and go back to their communities and keep doing these things year round,” Snedeis ker said. “Our biggest goal to be as independent as possible. You can do what you choose to do and a lot of these kids’ parents come with the medical model trying to fix them. We’re not into fixing, we’re into letting them live and learn how to move and participate to the best of their ability. We don’t call it a disability — we say let’s go ahead and figure out your ability and see what you can do and we’ll help you with the rest.”