Under clear, sunny skies, hundreds of locals attended the National Ability Center’s free daylong anniversary celebration.
People of all abilities participated in everything the center has to offer, including archery, a high ropes course, indoor pickleball and indoor climbing. In the evening, guests listened to live music while getting tacos, sliders and ice cream from food trucks.
Meeche White reflected on founding the ability center with her former husband in 1985. At first, it only offered skiing, and has grown exponentially over the past 40 years.
“We ran it out of our dining room for the first couple of years, and then we got a small office at the resort, and that expanded,” she said Saturday. “I had always had a fantasy about having a facility where people could come and have those experiences and build their self-esteem.”
The nonprofit started out serving a dozen disabled veterans and has since grown to serve 6,000 people from around the world each year. Many families and people with disabilities move to Park City because of the resources the nonprofit provides, including Madison Baumann.
Baumann grew up in Washington and skied through a program in Canada. That’s where she learned about the ability center.
“I was told that if I moved anywhere in the world, I had to come to Park City and ski with the National Ability Center,” Baumann said.
But Park City is also the place where Baumann became disabled. She regularly came to Utah with her dad, visiting national parks and ski resorts. On one vacation in Park City when she was 11, their car went through a yellow light and got T-boned by a dump truck.
“I took on the full impact of the crash,” Baumann said. “I spent eight and a half weeks at Primary Children's Hospital, and thankfully, I only remember the last month of being there.”
Baumann ended up losing sight in her left eye and only has about 20% vision in her right eye. The change wasn’t easy.
“I would have visions in my left eye, and then I would close my right eye and everything would be dark, and I realized one day I'm having phantom eyesight in my left eye,” she said.
When Baumann learned about the ability center, she was torn.
“When I was told, ‘Move back to Park City and go ski with the National Ability Center,’ it was kind of this pull in my heart of, do I go back to the place that changed my life forever?” she said.
Baumann visited again and decided to stay. After two years of taking part in programming, she had the opportunity to work at the center and move to the area. She’s now been on the nonprofit’s team for more than six years.
“I've been told in the past, ‘No, no, no, you can't do that, you can't do that,’ but here it's, ‘Well, let's find a way for you to be able to do that, and how can we make you successful in doing whatever it is that you're doing,’ and I think it's just the positivity that I love and enjoy being around,” Baumann said
Allie Schneider has worked at the center for two years now, but has been participating in center programs since she was 4 years old. Her family learned about the program through co-founder Meeche White, who told Schneider’s family to take her skiing.
Schneider said it was the best decision her parents made for her.
“Besides teaching recreational sports, it's given me the confidence to just say just because I have a disability doesn't mean I can't be like everyone else. I can do anything that anyone else can, I just do it a little differently,” she said.
Schneider was born with spina bifida and can’t feel from the waist down. She said doctors told her parents she “would basically be a vegetable.” But Schneider has continued to prove the doctors wrong.
She said she’s participated in almost every program the ability center has to offer, from cycling to skiing to the challenge course.
Through Schneider’s work at the center, her journey has come full circle. Last winter, she said a parent called to ask about the nonprofit’s skiing program to see if his daughter could participate.
“I asked him to tell me a little bit about his daughter, and it kind of gave me chills, because she was 4 years old, also had spina bifida, never skied before, and so I felt like I was talking to my parents, in a way,” she said. “It made it that much easier for me to share my story and share, you know, maybe what would be best for them.”
That family brought their daughter to ski and said she loved her skiing lessons.
Schneider said the ability center’s 40th anniversary celebration exemplifies the impact of its programs.
“The fact that we're still around 40 years later is just a testament to this organization and the staff and this community that are so willing to support us and volunteer,” she said. “It's just amazing, because a lot of nonprofits, they don't get a 40th anniversary.”
She said the nonprofit has built a tight-knit community over four decades, and that support continues to grow. Schneider and Baumann met eight years ago through an ability center program in the Grand Canyon. They kept in touch and now work on the same team.
