Cooper Slavin-Gay started playing basketball when he was nine. He has always been sports-mad, his mum Natalie said. He still plays in multiple codes, but basketball is the love of his life.
Cooper is 27 now, and was among more than 150 athletes from 13 clubs across NSW and the ACT to converge on the Newcastle Basketball Stadium at Broadmeadow earlier this month for the third round of the Leon Burwell Shield.
Sport is the great leveller, Ms Slavin-Gay said. Strip away all the artifice and fanfare and you're left with a level playing field where two evenly matched teams engaged in a fair test of skills according to universally understood rules.
Put another way: it was never just about the game.
Cooper, like many of the athletes competing that weekend, has Down Syndrome. The Leon Burwell Shield is the basketball arm of the NSW Special Olympics, named for "Mr Special Olympics" Leon Burwell who established the competition in the Hunter and was renowned as a mentor and coach to many of its athletes.
Ms Slavin-Gay is the code's Hunter Valley coordinator, but said the sport is run by volunteers, parents and carers, all of whom have a connection through the athletes.
"Everyone that you can see here is either a parent or a volunteer or a carer," she said. "That's how we get involved. We have children, or a sibling."
"We man benches. We step up to coach. It's the most fun you can have in a weekend."
The bustling activity on all courts in the first weekend in September was actually a conservative turnout by the competition's normal standards, Ms Slavin-Gay said. That weekend had been a busy one for sporting fixtures and some athletes had to choose between competing commitments.
Cooper loved sport, Ms Slavin-Gay said, because it was the place where his ability was never conditioned by disability. On the court, the game was the game.
"He used to go out and play mainstream football and mainstream soccer, because it's the great leveller," Ms Slavin-Gay said.
"He held his own. And it's not just about the sport. It's about friends."
Round three of the competition unfolded in a hurly burly bustle of constant activity. State coordinator Leanne Lanthorne said athletes competed across four competition rounds for the chance to win the Leon Burwell Shield for their club, awarded at the final competition at the end of the year.
The competition is run, she says, according to the Athlete's Oath, which says: Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.
"I have a parent here today whose son is playing in their firsty round," Ms Slavin-Gay said. "No one really gets it unless they come and do it. They came along. And she was crying this morning because they had found their tribe."
"They found their place where their child belongs."
"That's all that we all want."
