Help to get back in the game

Physical or mental disabilities need not be a barrier to working in sports and leisure

PETER BOUNDS used to be a textbook Australian: a surfer who loved rugby league and cricket, he was most at home in the outdoors and especially on the sports field. Love took him to Co Kerry and he settled there with his Tralee-born wife Linda a decade ago, finding work as the manager of a local supermarket.

Kerry is heaven for those who love the outdoors and especially the sea, and life was good. Initially the 36 year old wasn’t too worried by the pain and aches he first noticed in 2008, but within a year rheumatoid arthritis had turned his life upside.

“I spent four or five months on the flat of my back in 2009,” he recalls. “We had a new baby and I wasn’t even able to lift her.”

Work in the supermarket became untenable as the disease had struck both his ankles, both wrists, eight of his fingers and most of his toes.

Medication eased the pain and helped to keep the disease under control, but when Bounds wandered into the Fás office in Tralee early last year he wasn’t too hopeful about his career options. “I was looking for ideas but wasn’t too hopeful,” he says.

But Fás referred him to the National Learning Network (NLN), which runs Sporting Chance, a national programme that is designed to help people with disabilities or mental health issues to find work in the growing sport and leisure sector. Coincidentally it is based in Tralee.

“We had done research and had learned that while employment in this sector had grown by 175 per cent over 10 years, people with disabilities were not getting any of those jobs,” explains Michael O’Sullivan, regional director of the NLN.

In response to this, the Sporting Chance course was developed with the help of such people as Pat Flanagan, who runs the sport and leisure degree course at IT Tralee, and Pat O’Neill, Kerry manager of NLN.

The course is the only one of its kind in Europe and is very much a labour market intervention, according to O’Sullivan. “What we did not want to do was give people a range of qualifications and nothing at the end of it all.”

Bounds is half-way through the course and already has an impressive array of nationally recognised qualifications, including an ITEC diploma in gym instruction, a National Pool Lifeguard qualification and a number of Fetac awards in such subjects as health-related fitness, information technology skills, food and nutrition, and human biology. He also has obtained the Football Association of Ireland’s Kickstart 1 coaching badge, qualifying him to coach young children in soccer skills,and has the corresponding Foundation 1 qualification from the GAA.

Since he started Sporting Chance 12 months ago, a number of work experience placements have convinced him that this is what he wants to do with his life. He was an instructor at the Surf2Heal camp for children with autism at Banna Beach, Co Kerry, last summer.

“The kids loved it. Some of them are happy just to stick their toes in the water and some can surf at the end of the first day,” he says. “One mum told us that since her child did the camp, anytime he has a bad day he puts on his wet suit and that calms him down.”

He has also done a Halliwick course, which provides participants with the skills to teach basic swimming or pool competence to people with disabilities, and he has participated in a CampAbility project for children with impaired vision who can learn anything from surfing to soccer or archery. The camp, which was run in partnership with the Adapted Physical Activity (APA) programme at IT Tralee and the National Council for the Blind, is the only one of its type outside of the United States

O’Sullivan points out that 90 per cent of those in the first Sporting Chance class have either gone on to further education or found work in the sport and leisure sector.

“It was designed to remove the barriers for people who might not otherwise have found work in the sport and leisure sector but is very much a mainstream project,” he says. “These people have nationally recognised qualifications and they are multi-skilled.”

Sporting Chance is open to participants from all over the country and because of its uniqueness in Europe, it will be the subject of a lecture at an international Adapted Physical Activity conference in Tralee next year.

Bounds says the best part of the course is that it can be tailored to suit the needs or interests of each of the 24 participants, whether they want to be soccer coaches or life guards, and whatever the barriers that might otherwise prevent them accessing work in this area. “I would not even have heard of Sporting Chance if I had not developed rheumatoid arthritis,” he says. “My life is totally changed. I used to work for the man, as they say, but this is much more rewarding.”