Featured: Miracle League soccer offers unique opportunities

Standing in the middle of a baseball diamond buzzing with running, screaming and laughing kids, a bunch of beat up, hand-me-down soccer balls and a few patient parents, Jennifer Johnson admits she doesn’t know much of anything about the beautiful game.

But really, that’s not the point.

The founder, coach, promoter, organizer, Facebook administrator and occasional “cat-herder” of the Miracle League of Northwest Montana’s two-year-old soccer program, Johnson volunteers an hour of her Tuesday nights to bring something more than soccer skills to children with disabilities.

“It’s pure joy,” Johnson said. “Everybody has fun, everybody smiles.”

“(My daughter) loves it,” Jodie McGough, mother of nine-year-old Emma, said. “It’s like her favorite thing ever. And what I love is it’s not competitive and she’s still learning the skills, plus she has the opportunity to hang out with people she wouldn’t normally hang out with and just celebrate difference.”

At their most recent practice, 12 soccer players from ages as young as seven up through high school gathered to dribble, pass and shoot at a pair of goals dropped on the turf at the Miracle League’s specially designed baseball field at Kidsports.

The participants, including a pair in wheelchairs, range in abilities and, at times, interest. But they are all smiling. All practice long.

There is a row of moms in the third base dugout and another group of parents on the field, cheering on their sons and daughters, and helping Johnson and her lone assistant – her daughter, Anna – conduct this week’s practice.

Johnson is a full-time accountant and is not compensated for her work with the Miracle League, something she’s done since the field opened in 2008. Her two sons, Levi and Rawley, now participate with the Miracle League, and that made her choice to sign on as a coach when asked by Kidsports President Dan Johns a simple one.

“I’ve coached youth sports all of my life, so when my special needs son wanted to play it was an easy decision,” Johnson said. “We tried to have my son play rookie baseball and that didn’t go well, so for him to be able to play is really great.”

The Miracle League is a national organization with more than 240 fields across the country and a mission specifically focused on making baseball accessible for everyone. Johnson is a baseball coach in the summers and, after a one-off match four years ago, decided to try and bring a soccer program to life in 2014.

For McGough, who is not only a parent here but also the special education teacher for life skills at Glacier High School, there is great value in bringing this group of kids together through sports.

“I think sometimes my students get really tongue-tied and worried when they’re around non-disabled peers,” she said. “They get nervous, like ‘are they going to judge me? I’m not as good as they are.’ Whereas, in this case everybody can be themselves and you can accept everybody at whatever they do.”

There is still some important integration, however. At the season’s first practice, the Glacier High School boys soccer team held a clinic for the second year in a row.

“It was a great experience,” Wolfpack coach Ryan Billiet said. “(Soccer) is all about inclusiveness. Our guys really learned that there are no barriers for the game of soccer. When you realize everyone can play the game it becomes about something we have in common, that we can share, and there’s a love for it.”

“I think a lot of (our players) were a little nervous and uncertain on what they could do,” Billiet added. “But they got confident, they got comfortable and then they were buddies.”

The sense of camaraderie that the Wolfpack players felt with the participants is exactly what the program intends to bring week in and week out.

“The give and take in sports is something a lot of these kids never get,” Johnson said. “And a lot of them don’t have friends outside of school, so this is really a fun thing. This is their only social group for a lot of these kids.”

“They learn a lot about winning and losing, a lot about being kind to each other and those social skills that are involved,” McGough said. “That’s a big thing for me in my classroom too – the social skills that are needed to be positive and have good sportsmanship.”

“It’s kind of cool for (the participants) to say ‘oh yeah, I have soccer practice tonight’,” she added. “That’s what kids that don’t have disabilities say, and it’s cool for them to be able to say that, too.”

Unlike the Miracle League’s baseball program, which features more than 40 participants and multiple teams playing a regular schedule of games, the soccer program has no organized games, no uniforms and no funding.

“I would love to get to actually have games in soccer but I think it might be a long time until we get to that level,” Johnson said. “In baseball we have a buddy program with an adult on the field for every kid and I’d like to do that for soccer, too. And I’d like to get some better equipment. We have some very old hand-me-down balls that deflate every week.”

All participation in the Miracle League is free, and all of the coaches are volunteers. The soccer program lasts four weeks, with practices held Tuesday from 5 – 6 p.m. from Sept. 8-29.

The Miracle League of Northwest Montana’s soccer program is looking for equipment, volunteers, participants and clinic instructors for the final two weeks of the season. Those interested can find the Miracle League of Northwest Montana on Facebook or simply show up at Miracle Field at Kidsports during a session.

Soccer practice on Tuesday, September 22 begins at 5 p.m.