Miracle League to build a new playground

Miracle League to build a new playground

When will you be able to see the Pittsburgh skyline from the South Hills?

The answer: next spring, when the Miracle League of the South Hills completes its new playground.

The Miracle League is a baseball program designed to include kids with special needs on teams with typical children as well, as well as adult teams having the same purpose. When nice weather returns in early 2014, the League plans to have finished its new playground outside the field. It will display the cityscape (really clubhouses with a variety of learning and play activities) beyond the stands and the baseball diamond, just as the skyscrapers and rivers are visible from the Pirates’ PNC Park. The three rivers will be marked on the playground’s soft surface.

A year ago, says League Executive Director Maura Rodgers, the group began meeting with occupational and physical therapists, doctors, teachers and staff from the Children’s Institute of Pittsburgh. Their quest: “If we could take a clinic or classroom outdoors, what would it look like?” says Rodgers.

It would have to be a site “where children truly learn through play,” she says. “We wanted to dream up something remarkable.

“What a parent with children with special needs will tell you is,” she adds, that “while the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] helps playgrounds meet certain requirements, those are the barebones …” Placing ramps leading up to slides, rather than steps, won’t do any good for a kid in a wheelchair who can’t use the slide anyway.

The Miracle League playground will put developmental tools, in the form of games and play panels, throughout the site. There will be a variety of more traditional playground fare, since kids with certain disabilities may gravitate toward spinning apparatus, while other kids may be big climbers and explorers.

“How are all these kids who develop and learn differently able to learn on this playground?” Rodgers says. Children working on navigating steps may be intimidated or discouraged by a long staircase at home, but they will have an incentive to climb a few steps on the Miracle League playground if it leads them toward a game or activity.

Like the League’s baseball team, she says, the playground will be designed to attract typical kids as well. Concludes Rodgers: “We can all benefit when we work together as a team.”

Writer: Marty Levine

Source: Maura Rodgers, Miracle League of the South Hills