August 19, 2004
Going for the gold: UW lecturer plays soccer in Paralympics
When the Olympics we’ve all been watching on TV wrap up on Aug. 29, Mike Peters will be just gearing up for his version of the games. Peters, a lecturer in the Department of Communication, will be going to his second Paralympics Sept. 17–28.
Peters has cerebral palsy, but he’s been playing soccer since early childhood. His team is made up of men who either have CP like himself or have had a traumatic brain injury or a stroke. Peters played in his first Paralympics in 1996.
“I was doing graduate research at the time and I came across a site for the Paralympics, which I hadn’t heard of until that moment,” Peters said. “So I sent an e-mail off just to say, hey, I’ve played soccer all my life and I have CP, this is really cool, I didn’t know about it, wish you guys the best, go get ’em in Atlanta.”
To Peters’ surprise, he got an e-mail from the coach saying the team had not been selected yet and inviting him to training camp. He went, he made the team and he’s been playing internationally ever since — in the disabled athlete version of the Pan American Games, the World Championships and the World Cup.
For soccer players with disabilities, Peters explained, the Paralympics is the pinnacle of competition. All countries with teams are invited to the other tournaments, but only the top eight compete in the Paralympics. The United States team didn’t make the cut in 2000, so this is Peters’ first return to the games.
“What I most enjoy about soccer at this level is the dual challenge of mind and body,” he said. “We’re playing for a coach who was the assistant coach for the women’s team that won the World Cup in 1998. When you play for someone who understands the game the way he does, it becomes more like chess. There’s more thinking and strategic decisions involved.”
The Paralympics is the second largest sporting event in the world — second only to the Olympics. This year about 4,000 athletes are expected to compete — some in sports much like their Olympic counterparts and some designed with disabilities in mind. Goal ball, for example, is a form of basketball for players who are blind. It employs a ball with a bell in it and requires spectators to be silent.
The soccer that Peters plays is pretty standard. But participating in the Paralympics, he said, is anything but.
“On the one hand you’ve got United States of America on your jersey, so it’s this amazing sense of pride and commitment, representing your country,” he said. “Then also intensity is the one word that keeps coming up. All the training you’ve done, the moment has arrived. I kind of liken it to a thesis defense.”
Which is a pretty apt analogy, because even as he prepares for competition on his soccer world’s biggest stage, Peters is also preparing to defend his dissertation. A graduate student at the University of Arizona, he was just starting his dissertation research in 2001 when he came to the UW as a visiting lecturer. He’s been here ever since, teaching a variety of undergraduate classes while working to finish the degree.
So Aug. 27 is the culmination of that effort, just as the Paralympics is the culmination of all his sports training. And as if that weren’t enough, Peters has still another major life event to look forward to this year, when he marries former Olympic athlete Emily deRiel, who won silver in the modern pentathlon in 2000. The wedding is scheduled for December.
The relationship with deRiel came out of Peters’ Olympic involvement outside the games themselves. He was elected in 2002 to represent the Paralympics summer games athletes on the U.S. Olympic Committee’s Athletes Advisory Council. It happened that the modern pentathlon representative from the Olympics couldn’t attend that meeting and neither could his alternate. So the representative called deRiel and asked her to go. She said yes, she and Peters met and hit it off.
Meeting deRiel isn’t the only important result of Peters’ work on sports committees, either. When he served on the Disability Soccer Committee for the U.S. Soccer Committee, he met a woman who was a personal friend of the man who headed up something called the Sports for Life Initiative. An offshoot of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, it promotes reconciliation between past combatants in war-torn areas through sport.
“I volunteered with them for three weeks in Kosovo,” Peters said. “I helped with their soccer program involving Serbian and Albanian children. And I helped develop and implement a disability awareness program in the local schools. It was a tremendous experience.”
Both tasks were up Peters’ professional alley, since his academic field is health communication. But he credits his athletic involvement for making them possible.
“Being involved in sport has made me a better person because it’s given me opportunities to meet some tremendous people — my fellow Olympians,” he said. “And it’s allowed me to travel. That’s broadened my mindset on what it means to be a citizen.”
