Valladolid (EFE).- The Inclusport organization, dedicated to inclusion through sport, has concluded the season with the milestone that a handball team of people with disabilities competed in a normalized manner in the Valladolid School Games.
More than five years have passed since Óscar Perales, Yeray Lamariano and Andrea Reyes founded Inclusport, a non-profit association whose aim was to turn handball into an integration tool for people with disabilities, through their experience as professional players. .
What began as a humble project has become a benchmark for many people who have placed their trust in it, as an engine of personal development for children with different degrees of disability, with ASD -Autism Spectrum Disorder-, hyperactivity or deficit of attention.
They currently have more than 80 young people distributed among the handball, aquatic activities and wheelchair handball teams, which has led several of its members to form part of the Spanish team.
They range between 6 and 43 years old but there are no limits or barriers, since some athletes without disabilities have also been added, which makes it one hundred percent inclusive.
They are under the guidance of national handball coaches and a group of volunteers without whom all the initiatives that have been proposed over time could not be carried out, since they have added actions such as inclusive campuses for other sports like basketball or karate, to broaden the range of possibilities and for participants to try different things.
Perales explained to EFE this Thursday that inclusion “is becoming more effective because society is increasingly normalizing everything related to people with disabilities, both from a work point of view and from architectural barriers and even from a personal point of view.
“Before, people who suffered from some type of disability were hidden and now the opposite is happening: families seek resources to motivate their children and help them to live as full a life as possible,” he continued.
The idea of adding the Inclusport team to the School Games, in order to compete equally with other boys and girls, found the support of the Valladolid City Council, despite the fact that the vast majority of the members of this group were not of school age.
It has been a “very enriching experience for everyone, both for Inclusport and for the other teams”, whose reaction to this situation was unknown, “but they have responded very well, very normally”, explained Perales.
“We knew we weren’t going to win any game but the result was the least of it, since the important thing was to see the evolution of the team, of their behavior, learning to manage the frustration of defeat, and not only has the progress been spectacular in on the sporting level, since we went from losing by twenty goals to only losing by six or seven in recent days, but also on the social aspect, since they have created ties with other clubs”, he added.
All this has been a challenge for athletes and has also served to promote healthy lifestyle habits and install a sports culture.
Although Inclusport is registered as an association, it does not mean that parents who enroll their children have to be members, although they do pay a small fee to cover the expenses of the sports center where they train, insurance and clothing, something essential to enhance that feeling of membership in a club.
Perales has warned that the fact of not having economic resources “can never be an impediment for a child to play sports”, and for this reason they adapt to the needs of the boys and girls who are joining. EFE