Sports for Everyone

Co-Authors, Haley Schedlin, MS, & Lauren Lieberman, PhD

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Sometimes a book fills a need. Sports for Everyone fills two needs: the need children with visual impairment have for physical activity and the need for college students to work with these children.

“Through the years we’ve discovered children with visual impairments are behind their peers and have dangerous levels of physical activity and fitness,” said Lauren Lieberman, PhD, co-author with Haley Schedlin, MS, on Sports for Everyone: A Handbook for Starting Sports Camps for Children with Visual Impairments.

Having taught the “Introduction to Adapted Physical Education” course at The College at Brockport, Lieberman also noted the deficit in exposure her students had to educating kids with visual impairments.

“I realized that my students would never ever work with kids with visual impairments if I didn’t do something,” she said.

Voila!

In 1996, she started Camp Abilities, which since has served over 50 children each year, with blindness, deafblindness or visual impairments, and also educated 75 pre-service teachers each year about how to teach these youth.

Several things she’s learned, which Lieberman shares in the book:

• Because these camps only run for one week, “you really need a 1-to-1 ratio between camper and counselor. The 1-to-1 helps kids have instruction and feedback the whole time,” she said.
• There should be a nurse for every 25 participants.
• Instructional strategies for how to teach children who are blind or visually impaired how to play games like Goal Ball and Beep Baseball are imperative.
• There can’t be just recreation; you need to assess and teach the whole time.
• Lieberman’s also learned the importance sports bring to kids’ development of social skills. “It’s not just a fitness issue; it’s a socialization issue,” she said. “If you can’t bowl or swim or play a game, it’s very hard to be in social situations or even know what people are talking about.”

Lieberman’s goal, she said, is to have a Camp Abilities within a half day’s drive for every child who is blind, deafblind or visually impaired. If she can increase the opportunity these kids have for physical activity and increase public’s exposure to kids who are visually impaired participating in sports, then perhaps “the more people will expect youth who are visually impaired to do active things,” she said.

While Sport for Everyone offers several chapters on instruction, most of the book consists of every foreseeable form one would need to launch their own Camp Abilities. Lieberman and Schedlin realized that people who wanted to start their own sports camps needed a lot of support. After countless hours on the phone talking people through the process, they decided to develop a manual that organized all of the forms and their know-how into a “step-by-step guide on how to set up a safe and challenging camp for children with visual impairment,” she said.

Sports for Everyone has already sprouted three new Camp Abilities in Texas, Connecticut, all the way to Ireland. Next she hopes to translate the manual into Spanish so that more South American countries can get involved. So far, Puerto Rico, Guatemala and Costa Rica all host a Camp Abilities. All are amazed to see what their children can do.