This past Sunday, everyone was encouraged to get involved for a day with the Sunray High baseball program, regardless of their condition, gender or background.
Sunray hosted a Special Game Day last Sunday, a baseball camp for families with special needs members. For a day, they got to enjoy what typically happens at a Sunray game or practice, with pitching, hitting, base running, fielding and hitting stations set up for participants and monitored by Sunray baseball players.
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First-year Sunray head coach Keith Schultz, in his fourth year at the school, has set up the day as an annual part of Sunray’s season. He said it started when he was an assistant at Oklahoma Panhandle State University.
“I met a lady who said she had a son with special needs and said he loved baseball,” Schultz said. “I told her to have him come and hang out. Baseball’s very adaptable and you can create it any way you want. It kind of rolled out to setting up a camp or a practice.”
Schultz ran that camp for a few years before coming to Sunray and says that the university has run something similar involving all sports. The event has continued at Sunray, where the community has gotten involved in the event, with several residents along with the team volunteering to help run the event.
Nobody is turned away from participating in the day, as there’s no age limit for the participants, and the camp has drawn both boys and girls.
“The biggest thing is it’s all inclusion,” Schultz said. “We don’t question the disability, or the needs of the child and we don’t discriminate on the age. We’ve had kids and adults in their 20s and 30s.”
After testing their skills at the various stations, there was a snack break before the day concluded with a game between the campers and members of the Sunray baseball team. At-bats for the campers are adapted so each camper can obtain the highest level of success.
There have been benefits from the event for both participants and Sunray’s baseball program. Schultz said that one participant from the previous two years is now in school and is a member of Sunray’s junior varsity team.
Whether a special needs athlete is capable of contributing to Sunray’s baseball team is beside the point as far as Schultz is concerned, and he doesn’t want anybody to enter the proceedings with any expectations one way or another.
“The big thing I tell the parents is that I understand how tough it is being around the special needs community as much as we have,” Schultz said. “I just want them all to relax if they can. They can watch their son or daughter participate in a sport everybody loves. Our guys just kind of take over and do a fantastic job with it.”
Sunray is still relatively new to having baseball in town, at least in comparison to some other Panhandle communities. Allowing the less fortunate in town to share in the sport could be a foundation on which the future of the program is built.
Schultz plans on running the camp for as long as he’s in Sunray and would like to stay involved in it as long as possible.
“As long as I’m here it’s going to happen, and if there’s a change somewhere I’m still going to try to let it continue in some form or fashion,” Schultz said. “It just means a lot to our guys too. I’m a dad of two little girls and it makes me proud of them outside of sports. For 16–18-year-old boys it’s a good thing for them.”