GRAND CAYMAN, Cayman Islands — In response to Special Olympics (SO) Caribbean Initiative’s drive to expand the pool of certified bocce coaches and officials in the region, participants have described the move as an effective way to reach more people with intellectual disabilities.

The sport of bocce requires players to use an underarm action to bowl a ball at a target, with points awarded based on its proximity to the target.

Bocce can be a useful tool for people with disabilities, some of whom may be physically challenged. Lauraine Delandro, a Special Olympics St Lucia bocce coach and teacher at an all-inclusive school in that eastern Caribbean country, is among a group in the Cayman Islands for the 2024 bocce tournament, which also features training of coaches.

“The focus in schools is more on cricket and football and other sports that they (some children with intellectual disabilities) cannot be involved with,” she explained after a coaches’ training session at the Lions Community Centre on Thursday. “I was told about Special Olympics bocce and I realised it’s a game in which they use their critical thinking skills and not really their physical skills, which some of them don’t have.”

Leroy Anderson, a Special Olympics Jamaica bocce coach and veteran special education teacher, is in the Cayman Islands guiding teenage players Dillon Raymond, 19, and Michael Grant, 15.

While familiar with Special Olympics — in 1986 he was presented with a global coaching award for his outstanding contribution to the movement at a luncheon in Washington, DC, United States — he only joined bocce coaching about a year ago.

“My original involvement with Special Olympics was through football and track, particularly track… but being here has been absolutely fantastic because the youngsters have been fully engaged and their involvement has been refreshing. It’s a fresh learning experience, it has been enlightening and therapeutic,” Anderson told the Jamaica Observer.

“From that coaches’ seminar, there’s so much information and much more to come. It was eye-opening… in terms of some little ins and outs of how you engage the youngsters. It is not just the competitive part of the sport that’s important, but the components that come together to encourage the youngsters to participate.”

Delandro has ambitious plans to become a bit of a guru at the end of the five-day crash course.

“I’m trying to be like an ambassador for bocce. When I go back to St Lucia I want to pass on what I learn to other teachers so we can even go into other schools that are inclusive,” she told the Observer.

“I had been reading and watching videos, but… now that I’m here I’m getting a more practical view of what it’s really like. It’s so much of an eye-opener for me because I didn’t realise there was so much other than pushing the ball and measuring the distance.”

Scott Boucher and fellow international technical officials (ITO) Richard Deska and Gary Pontenberg have been tasked with training and offering certification for bocce coaches. He noted the knock-on effect of upgrading the standard of coaching and officiating.

“We just want to maintain the game being played under proper rules. Like any sport, when you don’t remember anything about the officials there’s a reason for that — the game went like it was supposed to. There wasn’t a fiasco, there wasn’t a rule interpretation that was wrong.

“A lot of that goes back to the coaches understanding what we want as officials, and also the players understanding what the coaches want.

“The athletes who have had a certain level of coaching can maintain the flow of the game on their own and need very little coaching, per se, during the game. Those players are able to control their team in a team situation… we are not having to always remind them of what to do,” Boucher explained.