For kids facing illness and disability, finding hope and belonging can be powerful medicine. But finding hope and belonging is easier with a team behind you.
That’s where Team IMPACT comes in, a Boston-based nonprofit that pairs children with college sports teams. Take Mack, an 11-year-old from Needham who lives with cerebral palsy. He was recently “drafted” by Northeastern University’s men’s hockey team, which means he has a jersey and a family.
Photo by Alyssa Stone
Northeastern University
His story is just one of thousands made possible by Team IMPACT, which has immediately matched 4,000 kids with teams. We’re celebrating this milestone on this week’s Joy Beat. Team IMPACT CEO Krissie Kelleher joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share more about the mission to give every child a team. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: For listeners who might not have heard of Team IMPACT, give us a bit more than the mission statement. Tell us about what inspired this creation.
Krissie Kelleher: Sure. Team IMPACT, as you said, pairs children and families facing serious illness and disability with college sports teams. We are a 14-year-old organization that was born out of an idea between a series of Tufts athletes. They came together, and they thought this would be a great concept to bring joy to the world.
Rath: Everything about this is brilliant. As a parent, I know how amazing and impactful team sports can be for young people. Where did the idea come from?
Kelleher: One of our founders, Jay Calnan’s brother, was disabled as a young child. His brother actually had the opportunity to be a batboy for a local AAA team, and Jay watched as his brother’s life took off in a new direction, from a self-confidence standpoint to the fact that he felt sort of seen for the first time.
Jay reflects, too, on what that experience did for his parents as well, and their entire nuclear family, giving them hope and a new purpose in life. That’s really one of the key drivers behind this creation of Team IMPACT.
We really just believe that the power of teams to change lives is incredible.
We love to leverage that to help children who are facing chronic illness and disability, but what’s the most surprising thing is what it does for the college athletes, because one could argue that they get more out of it than the children that we serve.
Photo by Alyssa Stone
Northeastern University
Rath: Tell me about that. What have you heard from the college athlete side about the impact it’s had on them?
Kelleher: I mean, college athletes overwhelmingly tell us about the connection they build. We have a two-year clinical program, so our children are matched for two years with a college team, which really allows for a deeply personal relationship to be built over time.
What we find is that our college athletes report that, first of all, their mental health is better when they’re matched with a teammate. Eighty-five percent of our college athletes, when we survey them, say that. And it provides them with a real perspective check.
I think when athletes have a bad practice, or they lose a game, or they drop the ball, all they need to do is look over at their teammate and they’re reminded that, you know what? It’s not that bad. Look at what my teammate is overcoming. That level of perspective is really life-changing.
We have college athletes who take part in our program who decide to go into medicine or become a child life specialist, and their lives are changed because of this experience. So it’s really just this mutually beneficial relationship for everyone that’s involved.
Rath: Wonderful, and you’ve done this immediately [with] 4,000 matches, 4,000 times. Tell us a bit more about the process. How does a child get matched up with a team? And then, the whole signing day — how does that whole process work?
Kelleher: Sure. We start with really understanding a child’s medical treatment. We have a team of expert, master’s-level social workers and child life specialists who really work closely to understand the diagnoses — and many of the children that we serve have multiple diagnoses — but really understand the needs of the child in front of them. And then, they develop a plan to address the key goals for that child.
Many of them are social-emotional goals: fitting in and learning how to make friends, especially if you’ve been in a hospital setting for many years. We really take pride in the fact that we have professionals out there doing this work with families, and then we work with the teams to make sure that they understand what the goals are for their teammates.
Photo by Alyssa Stone
Northeastern University
When children get matched for the first time, they actually have what we call a “signing day,” and they sign a letter of intent with their whole college team there, and they’re presented with a jersey. There’s this great welcome moment where the team really wraps their arms around their match for the first time.
And then, for two years, the match will be there at practice. They’ll be there at the games. You know, we talk a lot about big moments. Of course, we have Team IMPACT matches who’ve won national championships with their teams, but it’s the little moments that make all the difference. It’s the high fives. It’s the challenging days that our matches face when their teammates are holding them up. It’s the smiles. It’s getting a text from one of them saying, “You got this.”
It’s those little moments that add up that make what we do so very important in the world.
Rath: You talked about the benefits to both sides of this relationship. It sounds, from the way you’re talking about this, that this is pretty deeply rewarding for you as well.
Kelleher: Well, it certainly is. I feel connected to this mission sort of on a cellular level — both as a former college athlete and captain of a Division I team, but also because I am the mother of a childhood cancer survivor. To be able to take those two foundational and [formative] experiences in my own life, and to have them come together in a way to be able to sort of pay forward all of the things that people did for us when our family was going through the most challenging time of our lives — it’s a gift in and of itself.
I wake up every day so excited to go to work, and I just want to see Team IMPACT explode in a way that we have every NCAA team matched, because there are kids out there that need us, and we’re not going to stop working until we get there.
If you would like to nominate someone or something for the Joy Beat, leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-BEAT [2328].
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