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Volunteers teach disabled individuals to ski

BY MELISSA MANSFIELD | melissa.mansfield@newsday.com

February 10, 2008

WINDHAM, N.Y. - When Sue Marcote tells people she took a blind person skiing over the weekend, they are amazed.

"But I say, 'They're blind doing everything else they do. Why not ski?'" said the Point Lookout resident, who is a volunteer teacher with the Adaptive Sports Foundation in the Catskills.

She joined the program almost 20 years ago, when her neighbor, Cathleen Driscoll, raved about her experiences teaching the disabled.

On most weekends, alongside the hundreds of skiers and snowboarders on the slopes of Windham Mountain, they and small teams of other volunteers teach nontraditional students how to glide down the mountain. Despite blindness, nerve damage, autism, missing limbs and other impairments, the students are excited about learning to ski.

Many winter weekends, Marcote and her family come to Windham Mountain - two hours north ofNew York City - to participate in the foundation's lessons.

"It's something we come to do together," she said. "My grandsons are seeing the disabled in a positive way."

Since the sports foundation's beginning in 1984, programs have expanded from winter skiing to water sports and cycling in the warmer months.

Once a year, usually in late January or early February, volunteers team up with the Wounded Warrior Project, a veterans' awareness group, and the New York City Fire Department to hold a weekend just for soldiers and Marines coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of them are amputees. Others have brain injuries or are blind.

Ken Liebel was in an Army infantry unit, and on Feb. 13, 2006, his second day in Iraq, a bomb planted in a roadside curb went off.

"I was blown up," he said, describing how he lost his left leg and parts of his hands, and suffered a traumatic brain injury, which has resulted in short-term memory loss. Nevertheless, earlier this year, he strapped on a snowboard - along with a prosthetic leg - and started to learn the basics.

While being led to the beginners' slope by volunteer instructor Brendan Hanley, 16, Liebel, who is 21, carried his snowboard and asked, "When can I start jumping cliffs?"

The volunteers around him giggled. Hanley, of Rockville Centre, told Liebel he could jump the cliffs now, he just had to learn how to land.

Before instructors hit the slopes with students, they go through a program to learn how to adapt their teaching methods to various disabilities.

Instructor Colleen McGowan, 32, has a degree in special education and uses that knowledge to help her students.

"I could get anyone down that mountain," said McGowan of Bayside.

Her husband, Chris; her parents, Jimmy and Mary Ellen Barnes; and her brothers, Sean and Shamus Barnes, also volunteer.

"It gets addictive," McGowan said. "It feels good to give back, to impact their lives for one day."

Many volunteers have encouraged friends and family to join, and the group of instructors has grown from 20 in 1984 to 189 today.

Cathleen Driscoll and Mary Ellen Barnes reminisced recently about a party 20 years ago, when the topic came up. Driscoll had been teaching on the mountain, and encouraged Barnes to join her. Both families immediately signed up. Now Driscoll's husband, John, Driscoll's twin sister, children and grandchildren join her most weekends to teach. "You get so much fulfillment or you wouldn't stay," she said.

During the soldiers' weekend, local schoolchildren come to sing for vets and guests. In January, Mary Ellen Barnes was helping to line up the students when a child asked whether he could shake the soldiers' hands. After she told him he could, the boy asked, "What if they don't have hands?" Barnes replied, "Then you give them a hug."

With her voice shaking, Barnes shared the story with her daughter and Driscoll. Then the children filed in to sing Lee Greenwood's song, "God Bless theUSA." After the tribute, the soldiers returned to their new mission: navigating the snow.