Unstoppable: Disabled Adventurers Beat all the Odds
Read the entire article HERE
“WAS ranks among the country’s leading adaptive sports programs, averaging close to 200 students and 100 specialized instructors per season. The organization, which gained non-profit status in 1995, even touts its own summer boating program, offering adaptive canoeing and kayaking in the off-season.
“The key for most adaptive programs is how you use the equipment and how you tailor your instruction to help your students achieve independence,” [WAS Executive Director Dave] Shreve says. “When our students with all manner of disabilities can participate and learn, it gives them confidence and shows them there’s a big exciting world out there with a lot of things to try and do.”
WAS has assisted students with a variety of disabilities, ranging from physical ailments such as spinal cord injuries and cerebral palsy to visual impairments, deafness, post-traumatic stress disorder, and autism. The resort regularly hosts Wounded Warriors and their families, supporting the WAS goal of integrating their students with the resort community at large.
“Beyond building confidence, one of the things I think you’ll learn when you talk to persons with disabilities is how at various times in their life, they feel isolated from other people,” Shreve says. “What our program does, at least in some small measure, is break down those barriers between persons with disabilities and their peers, family members, and friends.””
Read Jess Daddio's entire feature in Blue Ridge Outdoors here