The Grayslake North Special Olympics team is in their basketball season right now.
“Special Olympics is a club that is partnered with Grayslake Central. It’s an athletic club for students with special needs. It provides them with ways to build relationships with other students while also learning to be competitive and play various sports,” counselor Jennifer Witkowski said.
Special Olympics partakes in many sports throughout the year, but they focus on certain sports at a time.
“Right now, our season we are doing bowling, basketball, and then possibly track,” said special education teacher Elizabeth Hauser.
Special Olympics doesn’t do all the sports. They get to see which ones they want to participate in and go from there.
“That’s where we have more flexibility. We can kind of pick the sports that the students are interested in. Basketball is one of the strongest sports in our club,” Witkowski said.
North isn’t the only school that has this athletic club; many of the surrounding schools also have it, which allows the team to play competitively against them.
“We play against various schools that have a Special Olympic team. Cove, Vernon Hills, and Wauconda are some of the competitors,” said Hauser and Witkowski.
Even though they are a competitive team, they focus on skills to help improve personal scores among the students as well.
“Bowling was more skills based, so they didn’t compete or anything. We had practices and went over to Kristoff’s, and kids kept track of their scores and how well they did. For basketball, we have refs come in because we have to have a certain amount of games in order to qualify us for State,” Witkowski said
Special Olympics has a lot of sporting events coming up, so listen for them in the morning announcements.