I was born into a home with a Bedlington terrier and a three-car garage, and until I grew old enough to notice the world beyond the red front door and the cracked concrete porch, I assumed these things were standard issue.

Credit: Special Olympics New Jersey

Like the household practice in which my dad and I wore raincoats when dinner was spaghetti and meat sauce, volunteering at Special Olympics was one of those things I thought, at a young age, that everyone did.
There are lots of Special Olympics events that take place during the y ear—local and regional competitions for pretty much every sport you can think of. But it’s the state-level Winter Games that really stick with you, a series of memorable events including ice skating, downhill and cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, and snowboarding spread out over three days in February, and made all the more memorable because for those three days, to put it bluntly, you really freeze your butt off.

Yes, weather-wise, it’s usually an absolutely miserable affair, and I’ve never been good with cold. I remember being younger and standing in my room in the early dawn light, tugging on layer upon layer of long underwear before stuffing myself into a hand-me-down snowsuit that could barely handle the bulk of me. One year, it wasn’t until we were pulling the car up to the ski slopes that I realized—so preoccupied had I been with my under-layers—that I had forgotten my jacket.

For many years, my dad was the director of volunteers for Special Olympics New Jersey, and since Special Olympics is a nonprofit organization that relies largely on volunteers to help run the show, he was a well-known guy. I, by extension, was the well-known-guy’s daughter, a little kid with brown frizzy curls and an enormous bulky snowsuit. When we arrived, I would mill around the indoor Volunteer check-in table for as long as I could to keep from being sent outside. I’d keep a low-profile, offering to write nametags or hand out lunch tickets until my dad spotted me and suggested I head out (of the warm ski lodge) and off to my post on the frozen hillside.

Now, let me be clear: It had never occurred to me that I could simply ask not to go. Like Jewish summer day camp, with its mandatory swim sessions and sticky kosher ice pops, this was something I didn’t always enjoy but just did. Perhaps more accurately, in the case of Special Olympics Winter Games, it was something that my dad and I just did together.

Since volunteers who couldn’t ski were assigned to help out at the cross-country events (no skis required), this was where I was always sent. My assignment was to be the results runner. This meant that I would take the completed time sheets handed to me by Ellen at the finish line and trot them over to Mike in calculations, who would check the times and give the athletes who had competed in each heat an official place. Along my route, I would say hello to Sunny, who shot off the starter gun at the starting line, and to Rick and Nancy, who helped stage the athletes according to their heats, and to various other recognizable faces.

In later years, as I got older, I graduated out of my results running duties and was trusted with a stopwatch. At the finish line, I recorded athletes’ times with fellow timers Leo and Kenny and several others who were new from year to year. I enjoyed being a timer because it allowed me to stand and chat with the other volunteers, but I disliked that it was a significantly colder assignment than when my duties had been more aerobic.

At various times, I’d also been asked to help with awards, and a smattering of other tasks that the staff had thought to use me for. The thing about each of these jobs, though, and for that matter, any volunteer job at Special Olympics, at any of these sports competitions, ever, is that the job you’re assigned is only half of the job you’re actually expected to do. Special Olympics is, after all, about the athletes, people with varying types and degrees of intellectual disability—sometimes accompanied by physical limitations—who put everything they have into getting themselves down that snowy lane, towards you. The lane may only be 50 meters, but you have no idea how far they may have come so to speak, just to get to the starting line.
In other words, you’re a Special Olympics volunteer, and so you cheer like crazy.

I’ve come to recognize that the feeling I get when I come to these games with my dad—when I find myself standing on a ski slope with fingers achy from hours in the cold and I’m jumping up and down to keep the blood in my toes but also because I’m cheering a participant onward—this feeling is an experience that’s far from standard.