By Jonathan Brown
Down Special Olympics Club will have two athletes competing for Ulster at this year’s Special Olympics Ireland Summer Games, which will take place from 18-21 June. Bocce players Jackie Stewart and Chris Craig will represent the Downpatrick club in Dublin, with a chance to make the Ireland squad for next year’s Special Olympics World Games in Santiago, Chile, up for grabs.
The Ulster team will compete against fellow Special Olympics athletes from Leinster, Munster, and Connacht in a range of sports, including bocce, gymnastics, badminton, kayaking, and seven-a-side football, with Jackie and Chris making up two of the 228-person squad.
Jackie joined Down Special Olympics Club in 2009. “When I moved to Downpatrick in 2009, I was taken to the Down Special Olympics bowling club. Initially, I was just helping out, then I had a go at it, and I’ve been coming here ever since. In 2011, I started playing golf and skittles, and it’s gone from there.”
This will be Jackie’s fourth time competing for Ulster at the Ireland Summer Games, having represented her province in golf (nine-hole format) and skittles, winning a gold medal at the 2018 edition. She also represented Ireland in golf at the 2023 World Games in Berlin. This will be the first time Jackie has competed for Ulster in bocce, a variation of lawn bowls where the aim is to roll the bocce ball closest to the target ball, the palina.
Having experienced the games before, Jackie says she’s already looking forward to the traditional opening ceremony in June. “I’m looking forward to the opening ceremony – when we (the Ulster team) get on our coach, there’s police at the back of us, there’s police at the front of us, to take us to the ceremony. It’s a great experience.”
In addition to her impressive playing career, Jackie is heavily involved in volunteering with Down Special Olympics, coaching bocce and golf to the club’s Young Athletes section (four-to-11-year-olds) and Junior Club (12-16-year-olds) members. Jackie also takes photos at club events and is a member of the Athlete Voices programme, which sees her meet up with representatives from various Special Olympics groups across the country on a monthly basis to discuss policy and activities across the Special Olympics Ulster branch.
She described how joining the Down Special Olympics Club, which operates out of the Ballymote Centre, helped her to make friends after arriving in Downpatrick, saying: “When I moved down to Rathdree [Supported Housing] in 2009, I didn’t know anybody in the town. When I went [to the Special Olympics club], I got to meet everybody at the club and make friends with them all, which really helped me.”
Chris, who also joined the club in 2009, won his first-ever individual Bocce gold medal last year, and after impressing team selectors at monthly training sessions, he will now pull the Ulster jersey on for the first time. “I’m really looking forward to representing the club and Downpatrick. I’m a bit nervous, but it’s exciting too – it’s good to meet other people with your disability and have a bit of fun, that’s the main thing for me apart from anything else,” Chris explained.
For Chris, the club provides a safe haven to socialise on a weekly basis, and he was keen to point out the importance of its 20-strong volunteer team. “It reduces isolation. It allows me to get out and about, to get out of the house and socialise, and I’m lucky, because there’s some disabled people that can’t make it out of the house. And if there were no volunteers, we wouldn’t be here – the work they do is brilliant.”
In the full story read what Frank Donnelly MBE said about Jackie and Chris and the impact that they have had on the club.
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