For more than 50 years, the National Sports Center for the Disabled has been a world leader in adaptive snow sports at Winter Park, helping people with disabilities become active outdoors, offering competitive programs and producing paralympic athletes. Now it’s poised to expand its programs in the Front Range with a spacious new facility at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds.
The NSCD Adaptive Program Center opened Wednesday with a field day for 100 special needs students from Aurora Public Schools. They rode hand cycles, adaptive mountain bikes with e-power assist and fat tire bikes. They tackled an obstacle course and tried archery.
The new facility also offers a base from which NSCD can run trips to off-site locations such as Bear Creek Lake Park for paddling activities and Clear Creek for whitewater sports, both of which are just a few miles away. NSCD also runs rock climbing programs a mile up Clear Creek Canyon.
“It’s a learning center, it’s a social center, it’s an exposure center to expose them to different activities,” said NSCD chief executive Julie Taulman. “It’s a step in the right direction for us, and for people with disabilities, to have a place where they can try out all these different activities instead of driving all the way to Winter Park.”
NSCD was founded in 1970 after the Winter Park Ski School needed an instructor to teach some amputees from Children’s Hospital in Denver how to ski. Hal O’Leary, who died in 2021, volunteered and would help revolutionize adaptive snow sports through NSCD. Nine NSCD athletes competed in the 2022 Paralympic Winter Games in Beijing, including Taulman’s son, Kyle, an alpine skier.
NSCD has been offering some programming in the Front Range for 12 years, but it had limited storage space for its equipment at Empower Field and had no space of its own to put on events. While in discussions with officials of Jefferson County Open Space to help make the county’s trails more accessible for adaptive cycles, NSCD discovered the county had unused space at the fairgrounds. Officials at the fairgrounds, which dates back to 1954, also had been looking for ways to host more events. It was serendipity.
“We’re more than doubling our offerings in events this year, and we have this amazing partnership with NSCD,” said Matt Robbins, community connections director with Jeffco parks and conservation. “We want to get people outdoors, they want to get people outdoors, this is a population that is under-represented, and we believe open space is for all.”
The 100-acre facility gives NSCD lots of space to run programs and access to miles of trails. The goal is to host students from kindergarten through high school, as well as people with disabilities from Craig Hospital, Children’s Hospital and veterans organizations. It’s in a pleasant setting at the foot of Green Mountain with views of the foothills and South Table Mountain. There are picnic tables and a small playground.
“It just opens up a whole bunch of new opportunities,” Taulman said. “And, while the kids are here, they’re outside looking at the mountains and looking at greenery, which is really what we’re about. We’re not about concrete. Hopefully it will become a place for people with disabilities to feel like a home away from home during the summer.”
Those new opportunities include a fleet of hand cycles and adaptive mountain bikes, purchased with a $50,000 grant from The Hartford and another $100,000 from other donors. Taulman found cycling to be one of the best ways to introduce people with disabilities to adaptive sports.
“A lot of programs across the country have cycling programs, and the NSCD did not,” Taulman said. “When my son was first paralyzed at age 2, the only thing I thought about was, ‘How does he ride a bike? And, ‘How do I afford a bike as a parent?’ You don’t get them at a used bike swap.”
Hand cycles cost $4,000 or more, and NSCD’s e-power-assisted mountain bikes cost $18,000.
“You have these beautiful mountains here, and mountain biking is a huge piece of what people live in Colorado for, and what they love,” Taulman said. “It has been exploding across the United States, adaptive hand cycling and adaptive mountain biking. For us to be cutting edge and make sure we’re providing programs that people with disabilities want, this was a really important step — to be able to start offering this as a new program.”
As part of Wednesday’s field day, The Hartford surprised 9-year-old Luke Carruth with the gift of his own hand cycle. Carruth is a double-amputee who was born without tibia bones. He is an avid competitive swimmer, and last year he took up skiing with NSCD.
“He’s never been able to ride a typical bike, and he’s honestly been discouraged about that,” said his mother, Kelsey. “Today is the complete opposite — new opportunities.”
Carruth had never been on an adaptive cycle until an hour before he became the proud owner of one. Asked what he liked about the experience, he said, “Everything.” He liked the message that was being sent, too.
“Now people can know that disabilities can be anything, and you can do anything,” Carruth said.
Taulman’s son, 22, is an engineering student at the University of Colorado. He goes scuba diving, plays wheelchair tennis and rides hand cycles.
“He’s doing great, and I always say it’s because of adaptive sports,” Taulman said. “It helped him to live independently.”
