By Valeria Araujo – Editor-in-Chief

Jonathan Law’s Unified Sports team is looking forward to an exciting year.

Unified Sports is a program that pairs special education students with their regular education peers. The idea of Unified Sports is to give all students the opportunity to play sports in a fun, supportive, enthusiastic environment.

“I liked how when we practice everyone participates and it’s amazing to see,” freshmen Unified Sports peer Lily Downing said.

Unified Sports is starting the year off with many practices in preparation for their upcoming tournaments.

“The Unified Sports team loves the tournaments,” Unified Sports director Mrs. Daniels said. “They’re always so much fun for them. They can meet the other players from other teams and other schools and they always have a great time at the tournaments.”

The Unified Sports team hopes to win the prestigious Michaels Cup again for the second year in a row.

“When we won the Michaels Cup, which is an award for being an exemplar program in the state of Connecticut, we were very excited,” Daniels said. “I’ve been wanting to win this award ever since we went to our first Micheals Cup dinner 12 years ago.”

One of their newest tournaments is a Wiffle Ball tournament that started last school year.

“We’re really hoping to have more schools come and participate in a round robin Wiffle Ball tournament where a team is up at bat and a team is out in the field and then we rotate teams,” Daniels said. “It should be a lot of fun.”

Daniels said the team is looking forward to hosting its basketball tournament, which is in its seventh year, as well as participating in other sports.

“Soccer is fun and so are the tournaments,” Unified Sports senior athlete Luigi DeCastro said.

The Unified Sports team works with an air of camaraderie that helps the kids excel from year to year and show how they’re able to really play and understand the sport like anyone else.

“I love basketball and soccer is great,” Unified Sports junior athlete Atul Simeone Joseph said. “I get to play around with all my friends because all my friends are there and get to do some exercises that are fun.”