Horizon Unified Bowling: Forging New Opportunities
AURORA – Monday night, Horizon’s unified bowling team played not only its first game of the season but its first game ever.
Starting this fall season, Adams12 Five Star Schools will participate in the unified bowling season, and each of the school district’s five high schools – Horizon, Legacy, Mountain Range, Northglenn, and Thornton – will field a unified bowling team.
Carolyn Harris, the Horizon Hawks unified bowling head coach, is thrilled to be at the helm of the program’s first season because of all the new opportunities now available to the students at Adams12 schools.
“I’m really excited about this new program because it gives students the opportunity to bring awareness to their classmates and their community that students with disabilities aren’t limited,” Coach Harris said. “It’s helping them showcase their talents and what they’re capable of, and it’s increasing their self-worth in the process. It’s also helping me feel like even more of a part of the school, instead of just being a teacher.”
This unified bowling program is just the latest notch Coach Harris has added to her belt during her time at Horizon. Harris has spent nine years teaching at Horizon, but beginning three years ago, she started pouring energy into unified athletic programs.
Through Horizon’s SOAR program, Coach Harris and a group of her female students worked to start a unified poms program at Horizon, a program that Coach Harris has now been building for the past three years.
“The moment I heard they were interested in trying to start a unified poms program, I was all-in,” Harris recalled. “I thought, ‘This is so good, because it’s challenging to encourage the students I work with to get involved in either extracurricular activities, sports, or attending different events, and this is the perfect way to get the ball rolling.’”
Given her background, Coach Harris became the clear choice for the unified bowling job once Adams12 Five Star Schools decided to launch unified bowling programs this season. Now, she’s leaning on that past experience as she works to develop a coaching philosophy and culture for this new program.
“I think, in a lot of ways, that coaching can often run parallel to teaching,” Harris said. “You want to develop a culture of inclusion, and fun, so hopefully this can become another interest for them to love and get involved with. I think it’s important to have a culture where everybody plays, and you just do the best you can and work on developing your skills the best you can. We’re all going to encourage each other. If you get a strike, that’s great, but if not, that’s fine because we’re going to have fun and support each other either way.”
This opportunity is not only important to the Horizon community, but one that means a great deal to Harris too, as she enters her last few years of teaching.
“I’m probably seven to 10 years away from retirement, and so I thought, why not get to experience this and leave a mark,” Coach Harris reflected.
A state championship might just be the perfect cherry on top.
Horizon will look to pursue that state championship at the Colorado High School Activities Association’s Unified Bowling State Championship on Friday, Nov. 22, at the Bowlero in Lone Tree.
