Special Olympics at NYU
I have been volunteering with the Special Olympics Basketball hosted at NYU since sophomore year. I absolutely love going to training every Sunday morning in the spring and working with the athletes. I have gotten to know many of them and they tend to open up and respond well to me. It is such a fun two hours where we do basketball drills and work on various things with the athletes.
Since I have been volunteering there regularly for so long, I am usually the group leader for about 5-7 athletes and then sometimes work with another volunteer. Today I was leading a group of 4 and it was a lot of fun. Then, the coordinator assigned the 3 visually-disabled athletes to our group. I had never worked with visually disabled before, though I had seen them at practice many times before. I was interested to have this new experience and I'm so glad I did.
This was such a unique opportunity and it gave me a whole new perspective with working with people who have different ability levels. I had to approach things differently with these three athletes because I couldn't just show them what to do or ask them to come to me because it was their turn--it was much more physical/tactile than that. I just wanted to share this great experience and encourage people to continue trying new things and not be afraid of new opportunities.