Nike and Special Olympics have announced a new three-year global partnership aimed at expanding access to youth sports and improving training for Unified Sports coaches. Unified Sports, a Special Olympics program, places athletes with and without intellectual disabilities on the same teams.
The initiative builds on Nike’s more than 20 years of support for Special Olympics Oregon and will focus on Oregon, Berlin, Johannesburg and Tokyo.
“For Oregon as our backyard, that was really not a big shift,” said Vanessa Garcia-Brito, chief impact officer at Nike. “It was a natural ‘What are we going to do next?’ We also know that the Unified coaching experience is a really powerful one. And so thinking about, ‘How do we take what we’ve learned here in Oregon and take that to the world?’”
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The announcement came during Special Olympics’ Global Week of Inclusion, celebrating 57 years of the organization. The partnership will update coaching materials, train more volunteer coaches and increase opportunities for girls and young women in sport.
“With the four locations, we are going to be proactively helping to recruit 600 new Unified coaches,” Garcia-Brito said. “We will be reaching 118,000 Special Olympic Unified Sport coaches, which is important, but more important is that they will be reaching 176,000 athletes.”
With guidance from coaches in Oregon, the updated training materials will build on local experience to train new coaches around the world.
“Coaching and supporting players in Unified Basketball games has been one of the most rewarding parts of my role,” Jamaal Goodlow, Unified Basketball Coach of Parkrose High School, said in a news release. “As a properly trained Unified coach, I know how essential it is to foster inclusion, teamwork, and mutual respect on and off the field.”
Oregon-based Nike employees are among the first to volunteer under the new initiative, beginning with the Special Olympics Oregon Summer Games that took place July 12-13.
“We have a shared vision,” Garcia-Brito said. “We believe that sport is for all, and that it can be really transformational for not just young people, frankly, but all stages of every individual’s life.”
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