Unified Sports brings BHS students together

Special education and general education students are now competing together in varsity-level sports at Bloomfield High School in a recently inaugurated athletic program called Unified Sports.

Play is with boys and girls on the same team against other schools with similar programs. BHS kicked off competition in the spring of 2023 with bocce ball.

The high school Unified Sports program was initiated by physical education instructor Meghan Leonard, who is also involved with Bloomfield Special Olympics. She is the sole coach for all Unified Sports teams. Other activities currently on the schedule are bowling, basketball, and track and field.

“It’s a cool program,” she said. “At the end of the last school year, we started with a bocce team. We rolled out the artificial turf and practiced in the Pit.”

The Pit is a first-floor gym in the high school.

“We started with bocce because you don’t need a lot of players,” she continued. “And it doesn’t cost much money.”

Special ed participants, she said, are called “unified athletes” and general ed participants are “unified partners.” To create a Unified Sports team, BHS already had a source of unified athletes because of the township’s long-time involvement with the Special Olympics. To recruit unified partners, the general education students, an announcement at a meeting of all BHS athletes got the word out. BHS varsity team members, however, are ineligible.

“In the beginning, general ed students wanted to find out what Unified Sports was all about,” Leonard said. “Even colleges have these programs, colleges that they’re looking into.”

Others interested in the program were volunteers with the Special Olympics.

“Bloomfield has been involved with the Special Olympics for over 40 years and has over 60 special ed athletes in Special Olympics,” she said.

Unified Sports track and field will begin this spring. Right now, there are eight bocce participants, 15 bowlers and 13 basketball players. Some athletes play more than one sport.

Leonard started in the school district as a paraprofessional, then taught at Belleville High School and returned to the district in 2021. She provided a quick bocce primer.

Bocce is played with five balls of two different sizes which are made from marble and differentiated by color. The larger balls are about the size of a softball and four in number. They are the bocce balls. The ping-pong sized smaller ball is the pallino. To start the contest, the pallino is tossed onto the bocce court.

“It’s a mix of lawn bowling and horseshoes,” Leonard said. “You toss the larger balls to get close to the pallino. Couples play couples and each partner gets two tosses.”
The bocce ball closest to the pallino scores a point for its team. The winning score is 16.

Leonard, who coached basketball at Belleville High School, said coaching Unified Sports does have its unique challenges.

“One of the challenges, and I’ve coached basketball and taught the sport, is you use different key terms,” she said.

She gave as an example the basketball term “screen.” This is when the team trying to score has a player remain stationary as an obstacle to the defense. A teammate, who will receive the ball for a shot, feints movement around the stationary player to get free from a defender.

“If you ask for a screen, the unified athletes may not understand,” Leonard said. “So, OK, I might say ‘TV screen.’ There might be some comprehension difficulties. And the unified partners understand this and help the unified athletes.”

Crowd size and noise may also affect the performance of the unified athlete, she said.

Another characteristic of a Unified Sports team that is markedly different from a team made up of all general ed students is that the players on a general ed team are competing against each other for playing time.

“Not so, from what I’ve seen, with Unified Sports,” Leonard said.

Since basketball, bowling, and track and field are BHS varsity sports, Leonard said Unified Sports athletes will also receive varsity letters.

“For bocce, if they put the time in, I still give them a varsity letter,” she said. “I’m going to call the vendor who makes the varsity jackets if they could come up with a Unified Sports patch, in addition to a varsity letter.”

  bloomfield, Unified Sports