More than 300 elite soccer players convened in Detroit in summer 2022 for an international tournament. While thousands of fans cheered from the stands, the skilled footballers from more than 20 countries ran, kicked, passed, scored, and celebrated with their teammates.

But this was no ordinary soccer tournament. This was the Special Olympics Unified Cup, which  brought together athletes from around the world with — and without — intellectual disabilities.

It was a groundbreaking competition, not only for its inclusive nature but also because it gave three University of Michigan School of Kinesiology (SoK) alumni the opportunity to partner on pioneering research. Using wearable devices that tracked the movement of the Unified Cup athletes, Leah Ketcheson (PhD ‘14), Janet Hauck (PhD ‘12), and Andy Pitchford (PhD ‘16) were able to assess the activity levels of diverse athletes, with the ultimate goal of improving and increasing athletic programming for an underserved and often overlooked population.  

“Even though Special Olympics has been around since the 1970s, a lot of what has been published in the scientific literature has been about attitudes or about how people feel about being involved,” says Andy Pitchford, an assistant kinesiology professor in Oregon State University's College of Health. “This was an opportunity to study what was happening on the field during an elite Special Olympics competition and start to fill a gap that researchers have largely ignored.”

U-M roots

The project has deep SoK roots. Pitchford, Ketcheson, and Hauck first met as physical education undergraduates at Michigan in the early 2000s. They each took classes with U-M Kinesiology professor Dale Ulrich, including one that sent them out into the community to help deliver health promotion programming to individuals with disabilities.

“That practicum experience for each one of us was really quite meaningful,” says Ketcheson, an assistant professor and program coordinator of health and physical education teaching at Wayne State University. “It’s one of the reasons why we were all interested in continuing on this educational journey in adapted physical education.”  

After graduation, the three friends went their separate directions — to complete master’s programs and start jobs in adapted physical education. Ulrich “saw something in each of us,” Pitchford says, and eventually encouraged the alums to return to Ann Arbor for their doctoral studies. (Ulrich recently retired after 22 years at U-M.)

In their PhD programs, they learned how to envision, plan, and execute robust research projects.

“Dale was effortlessly able to create an environment that made us want to work together, to work hard but also to learn the methodology for how to conduct research well,” Ketcheson says. “He loved research, and he always placed a value on collaboration and working together to solve these big problems. His presence and his mentorship is something each one of us brings to our own research labs now.”

The three stayed in touch after earning their PhDs and moving on to become professors themselves — Ketcheson at Wayne State University, Hauck at Michigan State University, and Pitchford at Iowa State University, followed by Oregon State University.

“We were all inspired by the idea of training the next group of educators and the next group of advocates for this population,” Pitchford says. “We’re now at three universities, where we’re training students. You just continue to branch out the family tree.”

Field research

When Special Olympics International selected Detroit to host the 2022 Unified Cup, the three researchers reunited once again. They had all been involved with Special Olympics in the past, and they were eager to learn more about the individuals the organization served.

They began talking with Special Olympics Michigan, then with Special Olympics International, about conducting research at the tournament.

“The three of us wanted to help improve the knowledge base of Special Olympics,” Ketcheson says. “That new knowledge could potentially impact programming initiatives or recommendations and, possibly, funding.”

In the end, they decided to look for patterns in physical activity among athletes with and without intellectual disabilities. To do that, they outfitted 166 Unified Cup participants with accelerometers, or devices worn around the waist that measure movement and physical activity, similar to a Fitbit.

For help executing their ambitious plan, the trio recruited and trained undergraduate and graduate students from Michigan State and Wayne State.

Once on site at the Corner Ballpark and Schoolcraft College, the students kept tabs on dozens of accelerometers, which they swapped from player to player between games.

In addition, the research team also gathered general health data on the players — such as bone health and blood pressure — while conducting free screenings through a broader Special Olympics initiative called Healthy Athletes that aims to provide athletes with disabilities with more insights into their health.

Understanding inclusive sports

After the competition, the researchers got to work crunching the numbers. Their first paper using data from the Unified Cup, published in November 2023 in the Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, found that athletes with and without intellectual disabilities had similar levels of physical activity as measured by their acceleration on the field during the tournament.

“One of the coolest things that came out of our study was there was really no difference in the physical activity on the field between the athletes with disabilities and their unified partners,” Pitchford says, “which suggests that it was an inclusive sport setting.”

The Unified Cup involved elite athletes, so the findings may not necessarily apply to similar events at the state and local levels. Even so, the initial data could help grow inclusive physical activity opportunities.

“If coaches knew that at the elite level there were equal contributions between athletes with and without developmental disabilities, would they be more likely to have an open mind to host more inclusive after-school extracurricular programming?” Ketcheson asks. “My hope is that coaches or Special Olympics personnel could use these findings to justify the need for and the importance of continuing to create equal opportunities for individuals with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities.”

Moving forward, the three hope to glean further insights from their work at Unified Cup. Next up, they plan to analyze the relationship between physical activity and match outcomes during the tournament. They’re curious to know whether physical activity levels were linked with goals, saves, assists, penalty kicks, corner kicks, and other performance metrics, as well as overall wins.

Incorporating data from the free health screenings and the accelerometers, they also plan to examine differences in health-related physical fitness between athletes with and without intellectual disabilities, as well as between countries. For instance, the researchers could find a correlation between bone health and physical activity levels during gameplay — is someone with stronger bones more active on the field, and vice versa?

“The health data gives us a broader lens,” Ketcheson says. “We might find disparities in certain measures of health between athletes, between countries or between ages or genders, and then that could better inform programming and opportunities.”

The trio is also collaborating with Haylie Miller, an assistant movement science professor in the School of Kinesiology, whose team is studying balance and postural control among Special Olympics athletes. Ideally, they’ll inspire more academics to conduct research that could one day benefit individuals with intellectual disabilities

“I hope it’s contagious to our fellow researchers,” says Hauck, an associate professor at Michigan State University, “to expand some of their aims beyond the social outcomes and dig deeper into more of the physical, sport and health contributions of these athletes.”