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Requests for 2009 Sports Education Camp Proposals - Information Here

Overview | History and Background | USABA Partnership | NSEC Project | NSEC Services | Calendar

The National Sports Education Camps Project - An Overview
The SEC project is a week-long residential program in which students 10-12 years-old learn and/or refine basic skills of running, jumping and throwing. Students 13-18 years-old learn and compete in judo, cycling, track and field, swimming, wrestling, goalball (a team sport for blind and visually impaired persons), gymnastics, bowling, and lifelong fitness promotion. Sessions for each of the camp's sports will be run by Paralympians and elite coaches who are brought in from around the United States for the week.

There are numerous outcomes that result from the Sports Education Camps, including the following:

• Provide educational workshops to blind and visually impaired youth around the United States in health, fitness and sports programs
• Provide youth the opportunity to meet world-class elite blind athletes and learn about overcoming obstacles, the importance of discipline, staying in school, etc.
• Provide youth an opportunity to participate in a variety of sports which they might ordinarily be excluded from in traditional settings
• Provide blind and visually impaired athletes with the necessary skills to compete on an equal basis with their sighted peers; and
• Further involve the local community as volunteers at both events, which in turn will promote the abilities of youth with disabilities.

The SEC Project has not only served as an excellent opportunity to involve blind and visually impaired youth in sports, but because of our affiliation with Western Michigan University, we are also able to use the events to conduct a great deal of research on the youth served through the camps. The research done at the SEC's has shown that the skills learned at the camps has had a continuing positive impact on the lives of these youth. In fact, more than 45% of students who attended sports camp for two consecutive years participated on their home school sports teams. In addition, 80% of these youth participated in their school physical education programs, compared to 27% of blind and visually impaired youth overall.

The research conducted following the 2001 SECs shows that the number of questions answered correctly on the sports knowledge survey increased from 5.8 at the pre-camp assessment to 7.3 at the post-camp assessment. On the sports attitude questionnaire, youth who were returning to the camp for the second time were 42.1% more likely to respond positively to the statement "I know how to change a sport so I can play." This shows that not only are these youth learning skills at the camps, but they are able to apply what they have learned to help adapt sports to their needs in a school or extracurricular setting.

History and Background
In 1982, a group of adult athletes with visual impairments formed the Michigan Blind Athletic Association in order to organize a beep baseball team. After affiliating itself with the Department of Blindness and Low Vision Studies (BLS) at Western Michigan University in 1984, the group's attention turned to the broader problem of physical education and sports for children with visual impairments and they held their first Sports Education Camp (SEC) in 1988.

The SEC was created to address the barriers to sports and recreation through the following ways:

• Empowering blind and visually impaired youth by teaching them basic sports skills and activities;
• Increasing the knowledge of parents, teachers, and the community regarding the adaptations required for participation and the limitless potential of children with visual impairments in the area of sports; and
• Increasing blind and visually impaired youth's access to physical education, sports, and recreation by building a network of advocates.

The original sports education camp project included a weeklong residential series of sports clinics for children, a graduate-level course for teachers, parents, and "potential advocates," and the formation of a statewide management team to oversee the project and to build the network. In clinics of 15 students or less, the 10-12-year-old participants were introduced to the basic skills of running, jumping, and throwing along with introductions to the sports of wrestling, track and field, bowling, goalball, and gymnastics. The 13-18-year-old athletes were taught skills, but also concentrated on the competitive sports events themselves. A typical day at sports camp was broken into morning, afternoon, and evening activities, running from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. with breaks for meals at the usual times and snacks at the midpoints between meals.

Each athlete received approximately 30 hours in clinics or competitions during the camp. The accompanying graduate course on adapting physical education and sports was offered on the weekend preceding the camp as a distance education course. Enrollments in the first few years were 15 or less and primarily included parents, physical educators and special education instructors. The network of advocates represented on the "Management Team" consisted of athletes with and without visual impairments, vision and orientation and mobility instructors, university professors in visual impairment studies and physical education, and parents of students with visual impairments. A great deal of effort was also placed on marketing in an effort to foster the image of visually impaired children as athletes.

The outcomes, particularly in the objectives relating to the children's skills, knowledge, and attitudes, and those of network building, were so strikingly positive that they led to the procurement of a U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Outreach Grant award in 2000.

The United States Association of Blind Athletes Partnership
In order to help identify young athletes throughout the nation and equip them with the skills needed to become involved in sports opportunities, USABA and WMU formed a partnership in 2000 and were jointly awarded the OSEP Outreach Grant to create the National Sports Education Camp Project, a program that has since reached hundreds of blind and visually impaired youth in 12 cities throughout the United States. These athletes include students looking to become more involved in their school's sports and physical education programs through recent SEC participants such as Anessa Kemna, Kelley Becherer and Nikki Buck who have qualified for the 2004 U.S. Paralympic Team as well as Lindsay Sloan and Jackie Barnes who are alternates to the Paralympic Team. In fact, five members of the U.S. Women's Goalball Team are former SEC athletes.

The NSEC Project
Because the NSEC project is aimed at disseminating the Michigan model nationally, many objectives are common to both, including: those related to empowerment, education and advocacy. Those unique to the NSEC are: expansion of the model camp, the definition of the specific problem at each site location through the holding of focus groups, and the development of statewide or regional chapters of the USABA.

The educational goals of the Michigan project were expanded at the national level to include the development of an online version of the university course and of a website for physical and sports educational materials.

The major role of WMU in the NSEC is the overall management, of the project, including supervision of the fulltime Project Manager, fiscal oversight, selection and coordination of expansion sites, training and support of expansion site personnel, development and distribution of an Operations Manual, and development of all educational and informational materials. The USABA's role is to furnish the 10% financial match required by OSEP, development of new athlete members and State chapter affiliates, and the promotion of national involvement by the camp participants. The year one expansion sites included: North Carolina Central University/the Governor Morehead School in Raleigh, North Carolina; Marshal University/the Cabbel-Wayne Association for the Blind in Huntington, West Virginia; Cardinal Stritch College/Milwaukee Public Schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. The second year sites were Sports Vision Inc/Slippery Rock University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the Washington School for the Blind in Vancouver, Washington, while the third year group included: Inter-Actions inc./The University of New England in Portland, Maine; BlazeSports /Western Georgia University in Atlanta Georgia; the Texas School for the Blind in Austin, Texas; the Association of Blind Athletes of Colorado/the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind in Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Alpine Alternatives in Anchorage, Alaska.

The expansion site personnel, which usually included a Site Director to manage the camp and a Site Coordinator to provide technical expertise, was responsible for planning, managing, and evaluating the camp; the development of the statewide advocacy group, and the procurement of funds to continue the camp beyond the project support period. The activities offered at each site were patterned after those of the Michigan model camp, but most offered additional events tailored to the specific needs of the geographic area. For example, the Arizona camp offered Salsa dancing and pre-breakfast tandem cycling. The first four expansion sites were solicited as part of the grant writing process, but sites in subsequent years were selected through competitive bids.

NSEC Services
The NSEC services include:

• Children 10-12-years of age with visual impairments receive basic physical and sports skills instruction;
• Older children (13-18 years) receive more advanced instruction,
• Children 5-9 years of age receive basic running, jumping, and throwing skills and their parents learn how to teach them at a parent/child clinic
• Children who are totally blind and have low physical skill levels receive basic running, jumping, and throwing instruction at a pre-camp skills clinic;
• USABA offers a National Youth Sports Festival as a competitive venue for all camps;
• Teachers, university students, and interested persons receive instruction in how to teach basic and advanced sports activities and motor skills to children with visual impairments;
• Site organizers are aided in building a local advocacy network to promote programming; and
• Pre-service educators and university researchers will be given a forum for presentation and learning at an international conference in 2006.

There is some variation among the clinics at the sites in the multi-state model project, so we will describe the Michigan site here, since it is relatively typical. The 10-12-year-old group is introduced to the basic skills of running, jumping, throwing, bowling, swimming, wrestling, gymnastics, exercise, and maintenance of wellness during the first three days of the weeklong camp. The major emphasis at this level is on body mechanics, taught by using strategies such as providing a defined space such as a carpet square for the children where they can learn and practice basic movements of running, jumping, and throwing. Following instruction in basic body mechanics, participants practice running skills on the track, long jumping from a standing start, and throwing a softball, water confidence and basic swimming strokes, basic wrestling rules and moves, basic gymnastics movements, and bowling rules and skills. These clinics also are interspersed with instruction and participation in relaxation exercises, discussions of how to approach a physical education teacher in a local school regarding modification of activities (self-advocacy), and information about nutrition and fitness. This portion of the Camp ends with a track meet, in which each student competes to break his or her own best record.

During the last four days of the NSEC, the 13-16-year-old group come to the WMU campus. They are divided into two subgroups: those who have attended the SEC in previous years and those who have not. Those in the former group are given the opportunity to choose the clinics they want to attend, while members of the new group are scheduled to attend introductory clinics in all the activities being presented. The activities include: track and field, swimming, wrestling, goalball, tandem cycling, judo, and bowling. As was true with the younger students, discussions on how to approach the physical education instructor (self-advocacy) and about health promotion are also presented at the clinics. Several clinics are offered simultaneously in order to keep the number of participants small enough to promote optimal learning. The Senior Camp culminates in a two-day meet, in which participants compete against one another in goalball, bowling, judo, wrestling, swimming and track and field.

The USABA rules that divide competitive classes based on degree of useful vision are used in this competition to ensure that participants compete against those with similar visual ability. Former SEC participants, who are 18-years-old or less and who are still in high school, are also invited to compete each year.

The parent/child clinics present the children with the basic running, jumping, and throwing skills, while parents join in the session as learners. The presentation of skills is done through task analyses in a sequential and systematic way, so that the methods can be learned by parents and reinforced by them in their homes. This session is a one-day clinic held during the 13-16-year-old clinic and the first day of the competition, which gives the little ones and their parents an opportunity to see the older children as role models. This model was tested with excellent results at the Wisconsin site last year. The techniques used in these sessions are based on those of Dr. Debra Berkey, Chairperson of the Department of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, who is a national authority on body mechanics.

The Pre-camp skills clinics for those children who are totally blind and who have poor physical skills, is also held at the 13-16-year-old camp, since we are targeting older teenagers with poor skills. It resembles the clinic just described, but the activities will be more age appropriate. This group comes to the camp one-half day early, so that we can prepare them for the events that come later in the week that require running, jumping, and throwing skills. In addition, we assign qualified volunteer instructors to this group of students as they attend the clinics to reinforce the skills they were taught at the pre-camp skills clinic.

In 2003, USABA summer program that will allow participants from all NSEC sites to compete against one another. The National Youth Sports Festival is held after the summer camps have been completed and USABA provides scholarships for many participants.

In all parts of the Camps, instruction is delivered by university faculty members, experienced blind athletes, blindness professionals, physical educators and coaches. Other volunteer tasks are done by Preservice university students in education, special education, blindness and low vision studies, occupational therapy, adaptive and mainstream physical education, recreation and other fields. All volunteers who have no experience with blind students receive instructional training via either the for-credit university course (BLRH 606) and/or through an inservice workshop delivered at a volunteer meeting preceding the camps. In either case, this training focuses on overcoming the communications barriers that exist between sighted instructors and blind learners. Volunteers are encouraged, for example, to use precise language, give the task of describing new equipment to the learner, rather than to the teacher, provide tactile scale models, give tactile modeling demonstrations, and use task analysis when teaching new skills. Step-by-step lesson plans for each event are also discussed and distributed at the pre-camp meeting.

The learning aspects of the project that involve teachers, university students and others take place through volunteerism at the camp, but also through our educational efforts. These include: (a) the online WMU course offered first in July 2003, which is based on DVD, Web-CT, Email, and telephone conferencing; (b) "how to" and "where to find" information on the USABA Web site; (c) an instructional pamphlet for parents, and (d) an instructional pamphlet and "Certificate of Participation" describing the child's experiences at the SEC to act as an introduction to school and community sports personnel.

The local organizers at the expansion sites are aided in network building by: (a) our training efforts in this regard, (b) our hosting a focus group of a cross section of representatives from all interest groups at their site; and (c) chapter organization assistance from USABA personnel.

The United States Association of Blind Athletes, a member organization of the U.S. Olympic Committee, is a non-profit organization that provides training for blind and visually impaired athletes for competition in nine sports. USABA members range from blind children developing sports skills to elite athletes who train for competitions such as the Paralympic Games, which continually draws more than 4,000 disabled athletes.