Evanston resident Caroline Colianne admits she was a little disappointed with her performance in the squat competition in the Special Olympics Powerlifting Meet held at Northwestern University’s earlier this month.
Her technique wasn’t quite where she wanted it to be, she said, earning her only a participant’s ribbon.
On the other elements of the competition, though, Colianne was up to her standard as a former Team USA Special Olympics participant.
On the bench press, she won a first place award. On the deadlift, “I did my personal best — which was 205 (pounds),” she said.
There’s no standing still, though — not for Colianne, or other participants in the city’s Special Olympics program.
The athletes have been training since March, running windsprints in the Chandler-Newberger Center on Wednesday nights, or lifting weights in the Fleetwood-Jourdain weight room on Thursdays and Saturdays.
On Friday, June 10, a contingent of nearly 20 athletes will leave from the Robert Crown Center to travel to Bloomington where they will compete in the Special Olympics state competition.
Success there is no sure thing, said Leonard Woodson, the city’s special recreation program coordinator, whose job duties run from overseeing the athletes training regimen to putting together a video, celebrating their successes.
“This is literally all the gold medalists going up against each other from all over the state,” he said.
Woodson joined the city in 1989, overseeing programming for people with various types of disabilities.
He applied for the job while a student at Chicago Loyola’s lakeshore campus, spotting a nondescript piece of paper tacked up by one of the dorm elevators, leaving a number to call.
Informed about the city program, he was quizzed about his people skills, he recalled.
Well, “I’m good with people,” was his answer, resting that response on his work leading tours at the Museum of Science and Industry.
The numbers have grown since he first started in 1989, with athletes like Colianne, a graduate of the National University Louis University P.A.C.E. ( Path to Academics, Community and Employment) program, based in Evanston, partly responsible for the groundswell.
The program is designed to meet the transitional needs for young adults with various disabilities.
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“When Caroline started she started to talk to a lot of her friends,” he said. “Then the next thing we knew we got this massive influx of former National Louis graduates that started to come to the program.”
Athletes with disabilities are free to participate in any of the city’s recreation programs, Woodson noted. “But there’s a kind of drawback to that when it comes to any kind of competition,” he said.
The Special Olympics format provides “a much fairer ground for everybody to participate in. Everyone is put in a division based on their ability level.”
“It’s kind of a thrill for me, so to speak, to be able to push these guys,” he said about the special athletes. “I’m kind of the mindset, even though they won’t necessarily keep up at the same level as people without disabilities, I’m going to push them and see if they can break barriers — where they say I can’t do it anymore, when all of a sudden they find they can make that extra push.”
He has help from staff, joining in the coaching of the athletes at practice sessions and meets.
“We are actually lucky because we get a lot of volunteers from Northwestern University,” he said.
One of them in the Chandler gym that night is Kate Kaplan, a sophomore, majoring in mathematics. She’s amused when school friends ask her what she does, and she responds that she coaches track and field, she said.
Kaplan started in the program about a year and half ago.
“I got really lucky,” she said. “I just signed up at a Northwestern activities fair to be on a list serve (for volunteering).”
She said she’s gotten to know “a lot of the athletes here which is cool because I’ve kind of gotten to learn with them, and see progress and get to know them as people which has been really nice,” she said.
There’s another benefit, she noted.
“It’s really easy to get lost in school. This is good for me to get my mind on something else.”
Woodson stressed the program itself “is a big plus for all our guys, whether they end up going to state’s to compete or not.
“I’ve always told them too whatever meet it is, even if they don’t win, if they’ve actually gone ahead and done the absolute best they can do then I’m proud of them for doing that much,” Woodson said. “It kind of goes along with the Special Olympics motto: Let me win, but if I cannot win let me be brave in that attempt.”
Judging from the intensity in the Chandler gym, these athletes are out to win. Colianne, a gold, silver and bronze medalist at the 2014 Special Olympics USA Games-Illinois Aquatics Team, was looking to sharpen her workouts.
“I have to do something really fantastic,” she said.
At one end of the gym, Lisa Noble worked with coach Matt Flynn on her mini-javelin throws. Lisa and her husband Kurt Noble are both in the competition, a new event in the state meet this year.
Noble made several attempts to throw the javelin, made of plastic material with a point. Flynn offered a tip.
“The key is to throw it like a paper airplane and not a ball,” he said.
One of her next throws sailed nearly three quarters across the court, raising medal hopes.
A little more than a week after the meet, athletes begin training for the bocce ball tournament in September to qualify for the summer games next year. Flag football too is around the corner.
“It’s never really downtime,” Flynn said.
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