There will be joy in Murrysville this year. Once winter turns to spring in this Pennsylvania community just east of Pittsburgh, the Bill Mazeroski Miracle Field will begin holding softball games for people with disabilities of all ages.
According to staff writer Daveen Rae Kurutz’s article in the Murrysville Star, the field is the latest edition to the Rotary Miracle Sports Complex, which also has a basketball court for people with disabilities and a network of fully accessible walking trails in the Murrysville Community Park where the complex is located.
Photographs by Aaron Loughner show people with disabilities using the beautiful new facility during a sneak preview opening last fall, taking swings and running the bases. There is also a photograph of the field’s namesake, Bill Mazeroski, the Hall of Fame Major League Baseball player who spent his entire career with the Pittsburgh Pirates and famously hit a home run to win the 1960 World Series.
It took the Murrysville-Export Rotary Club almost six years to raise the $1 million needed to build the field, which Kurutz says features a unique rubberized surface that enables participants’ motility. They’ve raised additional funds since in order to have a concession stand and playground.
But even thought softball season is a ways off, there are plenty of opportunities to stay active in the depths of winter. Mountain News correspondent Ben Trotter was in Big Sky, Montana, to speak with participants and volunteers in the Eagle Mount adaptive ski program and capture video footage of them swooshing down the slopes of Moonlight Basin. One participant in the demo made for people with disabilities, Jim Laird, recalls how far the equipment has come since he first hit the slopes:
It started out with an igloo cooler and some duct tape and a seat belt to get me going on it… [I]t’s just an experience I can’t describe. It puts myself and my wife back out skiing together when we weren’t able to do that before.
But if the thought of cold weather is not desirable, more opportunities for indoor fitness activities are opening up for people with disabilities as well. In Cobourg, a Canadian town just across Lake Ontario from Rochester, New York, a martial arts dojo has been providing tae kwon do classes to people with disabilities for three years now. Instructor Jeff Morrow tells Paul Rellinger of the Northumberland News that the class is helping individuals build self-confidence as well as stay healthy:
Early on, some of the challenges we faced was co-ordination and balance… But now they can do it. They’ve overcome anything they couldn’t do before. They’ve surpassed what I thought they could do. It’s been fantastic and I am happy to be a part of it.
These lessons learned in competitive sports help everyone, with disabilities and without, learn the concepts of teamwork and healthy competition when they enter the workforce, and give individuals confidence they can achieve their goals in life.
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Image by Ctd 2005.
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