Volunteering at the Rotary District Disability Games: A Heartfelt Experience

The Rotary District 1070 Disability Games is an annual event where Rotary invites people with a range of disabilities, physical, mental or both, to take part in competing/partaking in number of activities during the day. This year's event took place at Ratcliffe College on Sunday 27th April, and unlike last years, we were blessed with great weather.

Participants come from all around the East Midlands, and each can choose to partake in up to four activities which included swimming, kurling, boccia, basketball shooting, darts, weightlifting, rowing challenge, archery, table tennis, wheelchair slalom and wheelchair dash.

We at Coalville Belvoir Rotary Club, like last year, ran the basketball shooting event. We had two categories, senior and junior. Each participant had five shots at the basketball and scored based on the outcome of the shoot. During the day we had sixty-two senior and fourteen junior competitors.

The scoring was very high with multiple scores of fourteen out of fifteen scored in both the senior and junior events. Remarkedly in the senior event, we had to have multiple shoot off's where on several occasions contestants scored the maximum fifteen out of fifteen. Eventually, we had to resort to a sudden death shoot-out, where the distance from the basketball ring increased with each throw. We did eventually find winners in both the junior and senior events. Below are some pictures of the trophies being presented to the two winners.

Although the day was hard work at times, those of us from the club that were able to participate in the games had a wonderful time

. Seeing all those happy smiling faces of the participants made it all worthwhile.

We look forward to next year's event taking place on 12th April 2026.