East Hampton Joins The Unified Basketball Ranks

East Hampton joined the booming ranks of unified basketball last week with games at William Floyd and Comsewogue on Thursday and Friday, respectively, last week. Then the Bonackers got to play in front of their home crowd, finally, on Monday in a nonleague game against Patchogue-Medford.

Unified sports, as defined by Special Olympics, “empowers individuals with and without intellectual disabilities to engage through the power of sports.” Unified sports have been played in Suffolk County over the past several years — Southampton has participated in them during that time. More and more teams, specifically on the East End, are starting to join now as well — Eastport-South Manor just began its unified basketball program this season as well.

After a successful unified soccer day in the district earlier this year, special education teacher Ethan Mitchell and physical education and health teacher Krista Brooks got together with athletic director Joe Vasile-Cozzo and director of pupil personnel services Cindy Allentuck to see if it was viable for East Hampton to form a unified basketball team this spring. Largely based off the success of that one day, Mitchell said, the group decided to go ahead with a team.

With Section XI sanctioning unified basketball just last year, Vasile-Cozzo wanted to take that time to see how everything went before jumping in.

“We just wanted to see how it played out. Once we saw how successful it was, and after approaching our athletic community, and after we received that ‘Reimagine School’ grant, we used that money to help us facilitate the team and, low and behold, here we are,” he said on Monday. “Being able to provide these type of opportunities is what it’s all about.”

The athletes making up this year’s inaugural team include Liam Baum, Dominic Coronel, Sean Lester, Austin Miller and Nicole Verdugo.

“I can’t stop smiling. I love my teammates!” Lester told Mitchell on Tuesday, the day after Monday’s game.

“I am so happy to be playing basketball,” Miller said.

Unified basketball teams include both boys and girls on one squad and play the typical five-on-five game. Rosters are constructed with a three-to-two ratio of intellectually disabled students, or athletes, with non-intellectually disabled students, or partners. Mitchell, who is also the district’s varsity wrestling head coach, said the team currently has a rotating cast of 15 players total.

Each team will play six games total with one nonleague game. Due to the big boom in unified basketball, there are now four leagues in the county, and for the first time this season, there will be playoffs. The four league champion teams will advance to the county semifinals with the winners moving on to play for a county championship.

“I love playing basketball!” Baum told Mitchell. “The games have been great!” Coronel added.

After the team’s first game at William Floyd on May 12, Mitchell was blown away by what some of the schools who have been competing for some time now are doing before, during and after their games.

“The gym was bumping. It was quite the atmosphere,” he said of the game at Floyd. “It was a friendly but loud atmosphere and they were all very welcoming. They had an announcer calling the lineup, it was awesome. The kids hearing their names after making their shots, it was awesome. The kids wouldn’t stop talking about it in class.

“The relationships they’re building with their partners are awesome,” Mitchell continued. “A lot of these kids don’t have the opportunity to work with their peers, kids they don’t normally see or interact with during the day. It’s definitely become a special place at the high school because a lot of these kids grew up going to elementary classes together but have now grown up adjacent to each other, so it’s a really good community of students who look out for our athletes. We’ve been able to get some of the varsity girls lacrosse, varsity softball and JV baseball players to integrate with some other spring sports athletes, and just having them being in the gym together was awesome.”

Mitchell said he spoke to Southampton physical education teacher Brian Tenety, who has been running his district’s unified spots program for years now, for some tips, and he learned quite a bit from him.

“Brian was a tremendous help, and his big thing is his push for authenticity, which really resonated with me,” he said. “You want that real feel as much as you can. This is similar to Special Olympics without the title. It’s also meant to be a little more competitive, so that’s why they have playoffs and a championship game. In Special Olympics, everyone medals, so with this we’re making sure we’re keeping with the abilities they have so it’s authentic and as real as we can make it.”