Eric Binu
You may have heard about unified basketball somewhere around school. Maybe you heard about it from someone, saw a poster, or maybe you played for Frontier’s team. If you don’t know, here’s unified in a nutshell.
Unified sports is a fall sport that combines students with and without intellectual disabilities in the same team so they work together and do what they love. It demonstrates how people of all different races, backgrounds, and abilities can come together, as a team, and achieve anything they work hard enough for. It also shows how as a team, we can break down any previous barriers to make school, and life, better for everyone, no matter their background. Unified basketball combines basketball, founded in Massachusetts, with unified sports, also founded in Massachusetts, to make a sport many across America have come to know, love, and enjoy. Compared to last year, in regards to popularity, the number of jamborees played across Massachusetts has also almost doubled. Frontier has proudly hosted its team of unified basketball players for 2 years now.
Unified, like all things, comes with its own set of perks. Aside from having fun, people can learn a lot from interacting and socializing with their teammates. As a player on the team, I feel like I have learned a lot about how the first impression of a person can often change a lot and you could have a whole different perspective of them in the end. No human being is ‘disabled’. Instead, they are differently abled, having qualities and talents that they can further improve on. Unified basketball helps us make friends, train our skills and learn to work as a team.