Transcription of Barbara Schneider and Mark Stevens for the show Maine Adaptive & Special Surfers #289
Lisa Belisle: Today it is my great pleasure to have with me Barbara Schneider and Mark Stevens. Barbara Schneider is the executive director of Maine Adaptive Sports & Recreation, and Mark Stevens is vice president of the organization’s board of directors. Maine Adaptive, based in Newry, is the largest year-round adaptive recreation program in the State of Maine for adults and children with physical disabilities. Thanks so much for coming in.
Barbara S.: Thanks for having us.
Mark Stevens: Great to be here.
Lisa Belisle: I really like this program. I like what it has to offer not only the children, but also the adults of the state of Maine. Tell me a little bit about its beginnings.
Barbara S.: As the somewhat new executive director, what I know is the history, not personally but by being part of the organization. It was founded in 1982. A Portland orthopedic surgeon by the name of Chip Crothers had a patient who he believed would benefit from being involved in skiing. He got in touch with Les Otten, who at the time was the owner and general manager of Sunday River, proposing to create a program for people with physical disabilities, at least starting with this young patient so that she could ski. He thought it would be good for her balance, for her general being able to be outside, her general health and wellbeing. That was the way it started. Mark actually can give a good bit of history because his father became one of the early founders of the organization as well.
Mark Stevens: Yeah. My earliest remembrance of being involved in Maine Adaptive at the time was Maine Handicapped Skiing, but now it’s been rebranded Maine Adaptive Sports because we do so much more than just skiing. I was conscripted at an early age. I had just graduated from Bates College. I was on the ski race team up there, and my father basically told me and several of my race ski team members that we were going to be doing the Ski-a-thon. That was in 1985, and that was the first Ski-a-thon, which is coming up here shortly.
The program has just grown from the early beginnings with Chip and Les, and there was another Charlie involved, Charlie Roscoe, so really four founders. Just been exciting to see the growth of the program, and now we’ve expanded into year-round programming. It’s not just skiing. We do summer programming, which involves biking, kayaking, geocaching, all sorts of different activities. It’s been really phenomenal to watch the organization’s growth.
Lisa Belisle: You mentioned two benefits, one being the outside, nature, the connection to that that you’re able to foster in people who take part in this. Then the other is really getting to know oneself physically in a way that can sometimes be limited for people who have different abilities. How much science is there behind this?
Barbara S.: There’s science in that our volunteers and most of our instruction is provided by a cadre of very dedicated volunteers, go through training where we the staff and outside trainers provide some background on disabilities and how they may be affected by cold or by movement patterns. There is some science that we all have to learn to provide the product that we do, but the idea is that people with disabilities can benefit socially, physically by exposure to sports.
There are so many examples in our program of young people who will start skiing with a device called a slider, for example, which is kind of like a walker with skis on it. They’ll hold onto a slider, but over a season they may begin to ski without holding on because they’ve developed some muscle tone, or they’ve shown some improvement in how their balance operates and their proprioception gets better. We don’t operate as a therapeutic program in a hospital setting. We’re a recreational program, but we try to understand what it is we have to do to tailor both equipment and the instructional process to the people who recreate with us.
Lisa Belisle: This is something that you’ve specifically decided that you’re going to be helping children and adults. You’re not just going to limit the age range.
Barbara S.: Right. We have children as young as four, and during the week it’s a really interesting mixture when you come to Sunday River, which operates a weekday program as well as a Sunday program. There’ll be a lot of preschoolers and four, five, six-year-olds. Then there are folks who are much older on the other end of the spectrum, people who have had Parkinson’s disease or incomplete spinal cord injuries or strokes.
It’s really nice to see that intergenerational activity between young kids coming to ski and older people, some of them returning to a sport that they had done before, but because they have perhaps low vision or limitations, need to have people with them and instructors to guide them.
Lisa Belisle: That’s interesting. I had been aware that you had people participating with different levels of ability, but I didn’t realize that you had older adults who might have at one point had “normal” abilities but then have succumbed to whatever illness or infirmity that they’ve had. When did that start to shift, or has that always been the case?
Mark Stevens: I think it’s always been that way. I can remember early on some of our early athletes that came to us had been hurt in motorcycle accidents and things like that. We have a large group of what we call mono-skiers or bucket skiers today, and they’re very accomplished. To watch these athletes move around on the mountain so freely when in their daily lives it’s a struggle to get around, and then when they arrive with us they’re out on the mountain just like any able-bodied skier. Actually, some of them move probably better than 80% of the ski population that’s out there today. It’s phenomenal to watch.
Lisa Belisle: It must’ve been interesting for you, Mark, as someone who has raced. You were in skiing in a very different environment. You were in a competitive environment. Everything was keyed towards going fast. How did your mindset shift when you started working with Maine Adaptive?
Mark Stevens: It’s interesting because I still view all of our participants as athletes. I think everybody has inside them some sort of athlete, whether it’s super competitive or just subtly competitive. We actually have a race team of kids today that compete both in disabled races that are geared towards various injuries that they have as well as some of these athletes actually compete against able-bodied athletes direct up and do very well. That’s the part that I really get a kick out of is watching those athletes move up through our program.
Some of them come to us, had never skied before, and then they progress through our volunteer corps and then move on to our race team and do very well even at the national level. We’ve actually had two athletes go on to compete in the Paralympic Games. It’s pretty exciting for me as an ex-racer. I still race a little bit, try to keep my body together, but it’s exciting for me to watch these types of athletes come through the program and know that the dollars that we’ve raised and the opportunities we’ve afforded them allow them to get out there and get these same opportunities that regular able-bodied athletes get every day.
Barbara S.: I was going to say, when we were talking about the goals of the program, whether it’s wellness, whether it’s socialization, whether it’s giving people appropriate risks to challenge themselves with, one of the barriers to accessing recreation for people with physical disabilities, it’s not just having the physical space that’s accessible or places to park that are closer to lodges. It’s the economic barrier. The equipment is particularly expensive. The buckets that Mark was talking about run about $5-6,000, so it’s not the kind of ski gear that someone can easily purchase.
By having it and providing that free of charge and providing the instruction free of charge, we eliminate a barrier to access. We are very unique in Maine and very unique across the country in that we’ve had phenomenal support over our 35 years from Sunday River that’s enabled us to put people out on the snow, volunteers and participants, without charging for lift tickets, without charging for lessons. That’s a phenomenal thing. For families who have additional costs because they have children with disabilities, for folks on fixed income, that’s made a big difference.
Lisa Belisle: How many people does your program help every year?
Barbara S.: It’s close to about 500 winter and summer. Some people will come because they’re visiting Maine for a week, and they’ll spend a week with us skiing. We’d love to encourage more of that in the summers too, and we’re starting to see that. Other people will come three or four times a season.
We have a bus that comes from Portland, generously donated to us by North East Ambulance Services. That bus will pick people up at the Iris Network’s housing center in Portland. Others will come there, and all these folks will come on Thursday to Sunday River. They’ll ski not necessarily every week, but we’ll alternate who gets to come with the bus. Folks will have the opportunity to ski a couple times a year.
Lisa Belisle: How many people have you served over the entirety of the 35 years?
Mark Stevens: Wow. That’s a great question. It’s got to be in the thousands.
Barbara S.: If we’re at about 400-500 a year, it could be up to 15, 12?
Mark Stevens: 12, yeah.
Barbara S.: 12,000, just thinking the numbers and thinking the years. Our ski program expanded from Sunday River to Sugarloaf, so we are there on weekends and some Fridays. Also, every once and a while we’ll do a little bit of programming at Camden Snow Bowl and at Black Mountain in Rumford. We do Nordic programming in the winter both at Pineland Farms and the new Bethel Village trail system that is operating out of the Bethel Inn. Several nonprofits in Bethel have come together to take over those operations for a community trail network, and we do Nordic skiing and snowshoeing in Bethel on Fridays.
Lisa Belisle: Mark, you mentioned also that summer was an important part of Maine Adaptive now. Where is your programming located in the summertime?
Mark Stevens: That’s a great question because we’re all over the state. We have a van, and we also have a trailer. We can take equipment pretty much to a bunch of different venues, but our bicycling happens here at Back Cove. We do take weekend trips up to Acadia, so there’s some pretty exciting venues that we go to. We also do kayaking up on Range Pond as well as, trying to think of the other venues where we….
Barbara S.: We’ll do an ocean kayak once a year out of Harpswell. We will do some paddling this summer closer to Bethel in an attempt to engage the community there and folks that may come to Bethel for summer recreation. We’ll do some river paddles. The Androscoggin Watershed Council does a source to sea paddle every summer from the beginnings of the Androscoggin at Lake Umbagog all the way down to Merrymeeting Bay. We’ll take our adaptive paddlers on one of those river sections to paddle along with the folks that are paddling for the day. That’s a way to integrate adaptive programming with regular recreators. That’s always a fun event too.
Lisa Belisle: This must cost quite a lot of money. How much does it cost per year to operate Maine Adaptive, and how much does it usually break down to per participant?
Barbara S.: Our operating budget varies between about $600,000 and $750,000.
Mark Stevens: Give or take.
Barbara S.: Give or take. The cost per participant is probably something I haven’t figured out, but we look at what our numbers are and where we think we can grow our programming. We have, as Mark talked about earlier, the Ski-a-thon raises about half of our operating budget, between $350,000 to $400,000. We do an annual campaign. We do a lot of grant writing where we’re looking to private foundations, to corporate sponsors. We’ve had tremendously good success with that.
We’re interesting in that we don’t take any direct federal funds or state funds, so we’re not applying for those governmental grants that have a lot of oversight and infrastructure requirements. Everyone once and a while a foundation may get federal funds that they’ll pass through in a grant to us. It is definitely an expense, and we’re always looking for opportunities to both raise awareness and raise funds as all Maine nonprofits are doing now. We’re fortunate we have long-time committed individuals, long-time committed corporate sponsors that really have helped us over the years.
Mark Stevens: Yeah. I don’t think we could not emphasize enough Sunday River’s cooperation. Without their in kind support of lift tickets and just everything that they do for us up there, they’ve been a phenomenal partner from the beginning and just really fortunate to have that relationship and to be where we are. We’re located right slope side. Our building is located slope side on the Sundance Learning Center, which has what they call a magic carpet, which is a surface lift. Our athletes just walk out of the building and they’re on the hill and off they go. You couldn’t ask for a better setup or a better partner than Sunday River’s been.
The last 10, 12 years, 15 years, we’ve developed the same real relationship with Sugarloaf. Actually, at Sugarloaf we don’t have a separate building. We actually operate mainstream right out of the base lodge, so our athletes, participants get booted up and suited up and out they go with the general population. That’s actually a very exciting model for us just because that’s really our ultimate goal is to mainstream our participants and athletes and not separate them so that when they head out, they’re heading out just like you and I. That’s really a phenomenal thing to see.
Barbara S.: In so many ways the mountains are great. I’ll give a couple of examples. February 18th, Saturday, we had a race where we invited athletes from adaptive programs in New England, and we had the hill space provided to us. We had the comps and events department set our course. We took over the race arena that morning. Our athletes came down and were announced. There were visually impaired athletes. There were athletes with cognitive disabilities in what’s called a Mills Cup competition. The physical disability athletes compete in a Diana Golden Series competition. We had the shuttle buses to take the family members from our building at the South Ridge Lodge. The resort’s shuttles took the spectators to Barker. That was great.
At the end of the season up at Sugarloaf there are going to be US Nationals. We’re going to be able to present medals to some of the athletes in one of the days of competition on behalf of Maine Adaptive just to recognize us as part of the Sugarloaf community. These opportunities are great. They help us build exposure. Coming up fairly soon is a World Pro Ski Tour that’s coming back to Sunday River, and that event will generate some interesting buzz and excitement at Sunday River. We helped bring that organization there, and we’re going to be the nonprofit featured partner for that event.
It’s really fun to be connected to these resorts and help them by bringing families to the mountain. They certainly help us by providing us with hill space and tickets and all the people from food and beverage who help cater our Ski-a-thon to the lift operators who are so conscientious about loading our bucket skiers on. It’s really a great relationship.
Lisa Belisle: It sounds like you also in addition to having people who help support financially your organization by doing the Ski-a-thon or by donating and in kind, you also have people who volunteer regularly in the program. What does that look like?
Mark Stevens: The volunteer population, we couldn’t do what we do today for the price of what we do it without the volunteer staff that we have. They’re just amazing. They basically do whatever it is that needs to be done, whether it’s giving up vacation time to come and work with these athletes. It’s pretty awe inspiring to watch how that all works. We’ve had volunteers that have been with us 20, 25 years coming back year after year providing the instruction and the athletic help to get our skiers out there on the hill.
We have a lot of volunteers that actually volunteer in the summertime as well. We’ve got a lot of crossover there. Skiing and biking and that sort of thing, it’s those two sports that dovetail each other from season to season, and so we see the volunteer pool shifting from winter to summer. We have north of 400 volunteers today that come in and help us do what it is we do. In addition to that, we’ve been fortunate to have some interns come in from UNE down there in some of the programs that University of New England offers. We’re always open to finding people from the various colleges that want to come in and perhaps do some clinical work with us or anything like that.
We’re very open to people coming in, and if there’s anybody out there that would like to volunteer, maineadaptive.org. I’ll put a plug in for it right now. Come to the website, give us a call. We’d love to have you come help us out. I think once you’re involved in the volunteer community, just the buzz from it, you just feel better about yourself as a person once you come through the Maine Adaptive doors.
Barbara S.: We talk about the benefit, the socialization benefit for our participants, the exposure to the outdoors. Our volunteers span spectrum and age too. We have a junior volunteer program, and then we have some medical students from UNE who volunteer. We have a great relationship with Gould Academy, which is located in Bethel. Every student at Gould has to spend time on snow. Some are competitive athletes. Some are on the prep team. Some participate in ski patrol. Some work in the ski school teaching community groups. We have this amazing group this year of four students whose time on snow every day but Friday is spent with us, and that’s been great. They bring a lot of energy, and it livens up our volunteer pool a little bit.
Socially, I think our volunteering is important for our volunteers. For many of them, they’re retirees. They may have had a lifetime of skiing. Many are instructors who have worked at Saddleback when they were younger or worked at Lost Valley or were on the staff at the ski school at Sunday River or Sugarloaf. This is a home for them. It’s really a nice community of participants, of volunteers. It’s great.
I have been there at Maine Adaptive only since October of 2015, and I spent some time in the ski school and have my instructor certifications. I have always been a child’s coach. I’ve started to do more training for our volunteers, and I have to say, there’s some amazing skiers who have even in a more advanced age of skiing have all those fundamental moves that they’re just beautiful skiers. They may not take the risks that young ski instructors take, but they know their stuff.
We are very committed to making sure through our training that we give all our instructors the skills they need in all the sports. We set up ACA paddling instruction courses to get people certified. We write grants to send people through wilderness first aid classes. We scholarship our volunteers to do Professional Ski Instructors of America certification exams and trainings. That’s very important, and it shows because the quality is very good in our instruction.
Lisa Belisle: It’s been a pleasure to spend time speaking with each of you today. I’ve been talking with Barbara Schneider, who’s the executive director of Maine Adaptive Sports & Recreation, and Mark Stevens, who is vice president of the organization’s board of directors. I really appreciate the work that you’re doing and have been doing as an organization for 35 years now. I’m sure that we’re going to be able to continue to do this for many more years to come.
People who are interested can go to our show notes page, and we’ll redirect to your website. I hope people will do some Ski-a-thon fundraising, some volunteering. It sounds like really there’s a place for anyone who’s interested in being involved. Thank you, Barbara and Mark, for coming in today.
Mark Stevens: Thanks for having us.