Special Olympics at CMU

By Jacqueline Kim

Every spring, Carnegie Mellon works in conjunction with the Special Olympics to host the Western Spring Sectional competition, a regional competition through which athletes can compete to qualify for the national Special Olympics.

The Special Olympics is the world’s largest sports organization that provides training and competitive athletic events to individuals with intellectual disabilities. The organization supports about five million athletes from all age ranges, across 177 countries, with opportunities to develop athletic skills and abilities through community building experiences.

Carnegie Mellon has played a crucial role in the Western Spring Sectional regional competition since 2016. Despite this, up until this past year, very few Carnegie Mellon students and faculty members were even aware of the annual event that took place on their campus. It was not until this past January that the Carnegie Mellon community became more aware and actively involved in the organization of the Western Spring Sectional.

CMU Special Olympics is a relatively new club that was established earlier this January. The club was founded to work more intimately to coordinate and support the Western Spring Sectional alongside the Carnegie Mellon Police Department (CMUPD), Tartan Athletics, the dean’s administration, and Special Olympics Pennsylvania.

Aditi Shimpi, a senior studying business administration with a minor in behavioral economics, is the founder and current president of CMU Special Olympics. Although Shimpi’s initiative for CMU Special Olympics initially began as a semester-long consulting project, it has now become a major passion in her contributions to greater Carnegie Mellon community engagement.

“Our club focuses on coordinating and hosting the entire event on campus, especially through outreach,” Shimpi said. “Our main goal was tying the rest of the CMU community in with the Special Olympics, which is something that hadn’t really been done before.”

This past April, the Carnegie Mellon Special Olympics played a significant role in the coordination of the 2024 Western Spring Sectional. There were over 550 athletes and 300 volunteers that included Carnegie Mellon students and faculty. In addition to this, several Carngie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh clubs and organizations worked alongside the Carnegie Mellon Special Olympics to host an Olympic Village that featured various activities including temporary tattoos and bracelet-making.

“I’ve always been involved in the special needs advocacy and awareness space since I was a kid. So like it was through a deep personal connection to the special needs space,” Shimpi shared. “My family member has autism, and that’s always fueled me to try to embrace inclusivity as a way of life. And that’s sort of my life philosophy: to, you know, empower individuals with disabilities and embrace everyone’s differences as strengths.”

The Western Spring Sectional, put on by the Special Olympics and hosted by CMU, was made possible by over 550 athletes and more than 300 volunteers consisting of Carnegie Mellon students and faculty. Courtesy of Aditi Shimpi.

Despite the Western Spring Sectional being largely student-led, the event is also bolstered by the support of Tartan Athletics and CMUPD. Many of the Western Spring Sectional committees are led and staffed by members of the Student Athlete Advisory Council and CMUPD coordinates alongside local police departments and law enforcement to prepare for the opening ceremonies on campus.

“The Special Olympics is an organization that is focused on providing opportunity through sport, often for those who haven’t had the same opportunities as others to get involved throughout their lives in sport,” Director of Athletics Josh Centor said. “And I think it’s a reminder about how powerful sport and sportsmanship and teamwork can be, and it’s just a really it’s just a terrific event that we look forward to every year.”

“The most rewarding thing is just bringing a smile to an athlete’s face,” Sergeant Mark A. Villasenor of the Community Resource Unit said. “It’s just the sense that you’re actually doing something in their lives that is very meaningful.”

In addition to the Western Spring Sectional, Pittsburgh Special Olympics coordinates several other fundraising events throughout the year including the Polar Plunge. Carnegie Mellon also contributes to fundraising projects including Douse-A-Dean during Spring Carnival. There are many opportunities for students to continue to get involved in order to support the Special Olympics on a local, regional, and national level.

“It’s so important, I feel like, as a duty that we all have, as students, faculty and staff, to support inclusion in all of the different ways,” Shimpi said. “My vision is to make inclusion not just a thing that we do, but truly a way of life that all students and faculty hold.”