SPECIAL FOCUS attended five Special Olympics World Games. Before working with athletes with any type of disability, she says you may need to abandon your own expectations and biases about what it means to have a disabling condition. This was made clear early in her involvement with disabled athletes, when she was treating a teenager with cerebral palsy and made a rookie mistake. “I assumed that he had cognitive difficulties and kept asking, ‘Do you understand?’” Platt Meyer says. “He said, ‘Yes, I understand you.’ I hadn’t known he was literally a genius. He was 16 years old and going into his junior year of college, and he wanted to learn to swim. I was the person who looked really stupid. Don’t assume that if a person has multiple sclerosis or cerebral palsy that they also have a cognitive dysfunction, because most times they do not.” Ideally, you should also do some research on how the specific conditions of the disability are likely to affect athletic participation. For example, people with Down syndrome, Platt Meyer explains, are more prone to joint laxity, which can leave them vulnerable to sprains and unable to gain strength as quickly as many other people. The condition may also come with a predisposition to diabetes, cardiac conditions, foot deformities that lead to tendonitis, and atlantoaxial instability, a laxity in the upper spine that can preclude certain athletic activities. Or, if you’re working with an athlete who has a spinal cord injury, you’ll need to find out more specifics of the injury and how it affects the athlete’s movement. “Even the same level of spinal cord injury can be very different, depending on the individual. While one person may be able to do a chest press, that might be impossible for another person, depending on their specific disability,” says Heather Pennington, MA, CSCS, ACSM H/FI, Strength and Conditioning Specialist for the Lakeshore Foundation in Birmingham, Ala., a rehab center for people with disabilities and a USOC Paralympic training site. To learn as much as possible about an athlete who has a disability, Lori Glover, MS, ATC, Community Sports Medicine Manager for the Institute for Athletic Medicine in Eden Prairie, Minn., turns to the athlete’s parents for advice since they are often much more involved than other parents. “They are used to being a big part of their children’s lives, and that carries over into everything they do,” ATHLETICBID.COM
Heather Pennington, Strength and Conditioning Specialist for the Lakeshore Foundation in Birmingham, Ala., works with USA Quad Rugby athlete Bob Lujano as he performs a cross-over punch to strengthen his chest, shoulders, and core muscles. Glover says. “I’ve had instances where I’ve called to say, ‘This happened,’ and the parent says, ‘Okay, that’s normal. Give it five minutes, and this will happen.’ The communication has to work really well, because the kid might not be able to tell you what’s going on.” Regardless of the disability, it’s also important to understand the social implications of injury to an athlete with a disability. Alison Talley, MS, ATC, who works in clinical and high school settings
ties, a relatively minor injury may affect their everyday life in drastic ways. “If you or I sprain or break a finger, we might not be too upset,” says Hilmer. “But for someone who is deaf, that’s their means of communication. So it’s really quite traumatic and scary to be unable to use that hand or finger. “When I get deaf kids who injure a finger, I know I have to work a little harder to get mobility back in that injured digit quickly,” Hilmer continues. “Normally,
If you’re working with an athlete who has a spinal cord injury, you’ll need to find out more specifics of the injury and how it affects the athlete’s movement. “While one person may be able to do a chest press, that might be impossible for another person.” for the Institute for Athletic Medicine in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, which has an extensive adaptive sports system, says that an injury can cut a young person off from not only teammates, but daily involvement with disabled peers. “Most of these kids stay together as a team through all three seasons—they play soccer, floor hockey, and softball,” Talley says. “This is their group of friends, this is what they can do, and they’re accepted doing this. So if one of them can’t play, suddenly he or she loses that aspect of their life.” Another big-picture consideration is that, for athletes with physical disabili-
you’d tape the two fingers together to get them through. Well, with a deaf person I devise something to support it differently so the finger is free and can be used to communicate with people.” Another example of how an athletic injury can affect life is the athlete whose mobility depends on maneuvering his or her wheelchair. “If an athlete who uses a wheelchair has a shoulder injury, should we go ahead and put it in a sling, or can we do something else, since they use that shoulder for mobility?” Hilmer says. “You have to make some accommodations, do things a little differently, because of how they spend their day.” T&C NOVEMBER 2005
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