Sharing their vision

Around Spanish Town they call him “Ugly Feet.” In the downtown neighborhood known for close-knit banter and old-school charm, Phil Templet’s shoes are a hot topic. “Hey Phil,” one neighbor shouts with a smile, “Dorothy called. She wants her slippers back!” But unlike a gob of discarded gum, the jokes don’t stick to these sneakers. Templet couldn’t care less, because these admittedly gaudy ruby-streaked trainers are the 44-year-old’s first pair of running shoes, and he is putting them to good use.

Four years ago Templet went completely blind from congenital glaucoma, an eye disease that inundated his youth with medications, intricate precautions and 25 separate procedures. As a self-described TV kid, Templet grew up indoors in front of the tube avoiding P.E. class at all cost. His old friends wouldn’t believe it now, but the Pierre Part native is a charter member of a new running group and has a dream to compete in the New York City Half-Marathon. For him life began at 40, the year he lost his sight for good.

“I was expecting life as I knew it to become very boring, but the opposite was true,” says Templet, who teaches assistive technology at the Louisiana School for the Visually Impaired. “All of a sudden the medicines and the procedures, the need to be extra careful with everything was all gone. I started doing all the things I should have done before, so going blind was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

It’s no small task with a cane or Seeing Eye dog in tow, Templet says, but he always wanted just to do what other guys do, no strings attached. With his infamous shoes and new running club, Templet is finally getting his chance. There is one string involved, though, and holding onto the other end is the 33-year-old founder of Shared Vision Track Club, Rich Scott.

In April, Templet and Scott began jogging through the grounds of the State Capitol before work. Each holds onto the end of an 18-inch rope for their 6 a.m. runs. Three days a week Scott leads, and Templet navigates the course by reading Scott’s pulls and turns on his end of the rope. “All we do is talk the whole time about life and what’s going on, because the blindness thing goes away,” Scott says. “It’s just two friends out running.”

A New Orleans native, Scott and his family were forced from their Lakeview home by Hurricane Katrina. He settled in Baton Rouge because as a medical sales rep, the city was one of his territories. Before the move Scott’s 4-year-old son, Patrick, was born four months early and partially blind from retinopathy of prematurity. As Scott began signing his other children up for sports, he realized Patrick’s options were as limited as his vision. If Patrick and others like him were going to have an athletic outlet, Scott decided he’d need to start something from scratch. An inclusive running club seemed like a good fit.

Templet is the only regular blind member of the Baton Rouge chapter so far, though Scott has launched another running club in New Orleans, and Shared Vision could soon franchise with Scott’s friends in California. It turns out attracting volunteer guides to the non-profit club in Baton Rouge has been the easy part.

“We have the same problem a gym has of trying to get people to come out,” Scott says. “Getting blind folks involved is difficult because a lot of them probably aren’t running right now.” For his part, Templet hopes to break that stereotype, ruby shoes and all. He wants his students to realize they can lead active, integrated lives, too.

The key to Shared Vision’s success, Scott says, will be to fuse the blind community with a mainstream sport, instead of setting those with disabilities apart. Assimilation has become Templet’s mantra. “Anyone can participate,” Scott says. “We want to be a regular running club that just happens to accommodate blind people.”

Across town on Gardere Lane, recent Dallas transplant Brandi Polito is spearheading an effort to integrate visually impaired, wheelchair-bound and other special needs children with athletics in another way, using a high-tech baseball diamond and support from the national Miracle League organization.

“The idea of the Miracle League is to treat them like any other child, so they can be a part of what every other child is a part of,” says Polito, who works fulltime as nurse educator at Our Lady of the Lake’s Children’s Hospital. “That’s big for them.”

Organizers completed the initial Miracle League complex for handicapped children in Rockdale, Ga., in 2000. Polito hopes to bring Baton Rouge’s first custom-designed field with a cushioned rubberized surface to her father’s sprawling Cypress Mounds Baseball Complex in the next year. The designs are in, early fundraising plans are under way, and contractors poured the concrete last month—free of charge.

Josh Pedigo of Pedigo Construction had worked with Cypress Mounds owners Ronnie Polito and Pepper Rutland before, and when approached with the idea of a Miracle League field, he saw it as an opportunity to give back.

“If I’ve done well, it’s a gift from God, so I want to bless someone else,” Pedigo says. “The field will give them that good feeling, a sense of being normal. And if a young kid in a wheelchair can get out there and play ball, that’s all I need.”

A former pediatric intensive care unit nurse, Polito is passionate about helping special needs kids, something that’s evident in her new project. She envisions weekly games at the Miracle League field where every player gets an at-bat, everyone gets a hit, and they all cross home plate safely.

“Children with autism may be disconnected to a degree, but as soon as that ball is hit, they are right there running after it with everyone else, part of the same world,” says Paige Gagliano, a representative for The Arc Baton Rouge, a service and advocacy group for those with mental and developmental disabilities. “The self-esteem just pours from their face. You know we all grew up being told not to look at people in wheelchairs or with disabilities, and that mentality has caused us to not understand each other.”

Mostly through a small contract with Capital Area Human Services, The Arc receives an almost $7 million annual budget to promote vocational and inclusive recreation services like day camps and soccer leagues for the city. Its T-ball and softball program has exploded from four teams to 22 in the past year. That’s 340 children and adults participating. About 60% of the players are what Gagliano terms typical, and 40% have special needs. Arc executive director Barry Meyer says more parents from East Baton Rouge and surrounding parishes are migrating their children from competitive leagues to theirs and the recreational kind that could soon develop at Cypress Mounds Miracle League field. Unfortunately, funding is still a struggle.

“Funding authorities see recreation and think ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ But what they don’t see is that it provides inclusion in the classroom, then inclusion in jobs, housing and improvement of overall quality of life,” Meyer says.

He recently witnessed a young girl, a non-verbal paraplegic, go from completely shut off from the world to attending a music day camp where another girl invited her to a sleepover, to eating lunch with classmates in the cafeteria, to saying her first clearly defined word: her new friend’s first name. “She didn’t learn that from a speech therapist,” Meyer says. “It was because she was so moved and felt so connected. And it wouldn’t have happened if she had been kept off to the side.”

Gagliano doesn’t just promote the integrated sports leagues; she switched her children over, too. “They learn to value someone who is very different from them, someone living with a disability, and you can’t teach that,” she says. “A child has to experience it.”

And that is exactly what Phil Templet is after with the Shared Vision Track Club, the experience of being “just one of the guys.” So what about the day when he is more than one of the guys, when he has accomplished something many couldn’t do, and he and Scott cross that finish line together in New York City?

“I hope it changes the myth that blind people are not as capable as others,” Templet says. “Hopefully people see me and say, ‘This guy did it; why can’t I?’ That’s the message I hope gets out. If I can do this, what else can I do?”

Learn more at miracleleagueatcypressmounds.com, sharedvisiontrackclub.org, and arcbatonrouge.org.