Kicking GOALS by Josh

Kicking GOALS by Josh - February 2017 Scholarship Essay

Growing up with a stutter was difficult. My thoughts were always fully formed, but the words would get stuck. The harder I tried to force them out, the more they would jam up, like train cars going off a track. Sometimes kids would laugh or make fun of my stutter, but mostly they just ignored me. They had better things to do than wait to hear my ideas, so they assumed I had none worth hearing. Eventually, I gave up talking to people entirely. They thought I was stupid, and soon enough, I thought so too.

My parents signed me up to play soccer in the hopes that being part of a team would help me make friends. I wasn’t particularly athletic, and I could barely kick a ball. But soccer is a game anyone can play. On the field, my stutter didn’t matter. I discovered that I could lead, quietly, through action rather than words. Eventually, speech therapy resolved my stutter, but it was on the soccer field that I learned how to be me.

One of my teammates had a brother with Down Syndrome. Every season, he came to our games to watch from the sidelines. He had cleats and a ball that he kicked around by himself, but because he also had an intellectual disability, there was no room for him on our team or anywhere else. I realized that although soccer is a sport for everyone, not everyone is included in the sport.

I understood the pain of being excluded simply because of an inability to communicate. So, in February of 2015, I launched GOALS (Giving Opportunities to All who Love Soccer), a unified soccer program for kids with and without special needs. GOALS partners youth athletes who have intellectual disabilities with neurotypical peer buddies. The athletes and buddies play together, as unified pairs, in small-sided, non-competitive scrimmages.

When I organized my first GOALS program, I thought I’d start small, with one scrimmage of twenty players. I worked hard to spread the word, calling and delivering brochures to pediatricians, speech therapists, special education teachers, and support groups. The response was overwhelming. I received dozens of emails from parents with kids who wanted to play. I didn’t want to turn anyone away, so I reserved a second field and borrowed additional nets from my soccer club. The day of the event, I was excited to welcome the thirty-eight participants who had registered.

Only nine kids showed up. Among them, just four had special needs.

I was disappointed and even a little embarrassed by the turnout. But those nine kids wanted to play soccer, and I wasn’t going to let them down. We moved the nets closer together, turned on the music, and ended up having a great time. Because the event was small, we were able to give every athlete lots of personalized attention. Afterwards, one of the moms told me that her son, Micah, hadn’t initially wanted to come, because when he’d tried sports before, the other kids had made fun of him. He preferred playing video games online where no one could see him. But Micah loved playing soccer at GOALS with a small group of kids who cheered him on. What I’d seen as a failure—the event’s small size—made the day perfect for Micah.

Perspective is everything.

Micah returned to the next GOALS event, bringing along other kids from his special education classroom and playgroup. GOALS hasn’t stopped growing since. To date, GOALS has impacted over 400 kids and is now an official partner of Special Olympics Arizona. The growth hasn’t been because of brochures or cold calls. It’s been thanks to word of mouth from kids like Micah, who know that, at GOALS, a diagnosis doesn’t define them. If I hadn’t been willing to risk failure, I never would have seen this dream of mine come to life.