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The nonprofit Teton Adaptive Sports is active both summer and winter.
Teton Adaptive Sports branched out in 2005, and now offers summer programs as well as winter activities like downhill and Nordic skiing.
Teton Adaptive Sports is part laboratory, part social network, and part support group for its volunteers and clients—individuals like Steffan Freeman, who said the nonprofit organization has helped him learn new techniques and find equipment for cross-country skiing and canoeing.
Although still a capable athlete, Freeman is hemiplegic as a result of a stroke several years ago and has limited strength in his left hand and leg. Since meeting Kurt Henry, director of Teton Adaptive Sports, Freeman has participated in the group’s programs as both a volunteer and client, helping with fundraising events as well as taking advantage of cross-country skiing lessons and summer canoeing and rafting outings.
The program has helped him integrate, Freeman said. “This community revolves almost entirely around athletics. And if you can’t participate in those things, you’re kind of at a loss.”
Rooted in the Adaptive Ski Program at the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, Teton Adaptive Sports struck out as its own entity in 2005 to serve as a fundraising arm for adaptive programs in the area. Group members have gone from focusing exclusively on adaptive ski programs at Grand Targhee and the mountain resort, to organizing summer activities, such as cycling, rafting, canoeing, climbing, and camping.
To help pay for all of these activities, Teton Adaptive Sports relies on a host of valley organizations and donors. The Community Foundation of Jackson Hole and the Recreation Board of Teton County School District No. 1 help with funding, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort and Grand Targhee lend a hand with the ski programs, Rendezvous River Sports provides boats for summer outings … and the list goes on.
“No one’s really making any dough on this,” Henry said. “It’s all about passion.”
The nonprofit organization, the first chapter of Disabled Sports/USA in Wyoming, draws on that broad network of support to pursue three main goals: purchase equipment, fund scholarships, and provide training. “You can buy all of the gear in the world, and if no one knows how to use it ... it isn’t worth anything,” Henry said.
For some, the program simply matches individuals with the right equipment. For others, it helps pay for training so they can learn how to use their equipment. “We don’t think so much of someone’s disability,” Henry said. “We look at what their abilities are, and work with that. … Equipment and technology [are] at a point where anything is possible.”
Getting children and adults—the program serves everyone from kids to disabled veterans to adults with severe physical disabilities—onto the slopes and into the water provides a range of benefits.
“It gives them a lot of confidence to realize, ‘Oh, this is what I can do by myself,’” said Jackson resident Colleen Thompson. “It gives them courage and strength.” Thompson has two children with special needs—a twenty-six-year-old daughter, Nikki, who has spina bifida, and a nineteen-year-old son, Christopher, who is mentally delayed and has taken to skiing.
“He lives and breathes it,” Thompson said. “He can’t wait for it to start and he never wants it to end.”
Thompson said she has been able to watch her children grow and develop over the years through Teton Adaptive Sports. “I wouldn’t be where I am today with my children without [the program],” she said.
