Franklin Regional Unified Club captures Western Pa. bocce championship

When Franklin Regional life skills teacher Allison Harris helped start the high school’s Unified Club in 2014, she was hoping to create inclusive opportunities that would bring life skills students together with the larger student body in fun competitions.

She certainly did not expect the club’s track team to win a championship in its first full season.

But by the time the club had earned designation as a Special Olympics National Banner Unified Champion School in 2020, success in all areas had started coming naturally to students like senior Dominick Fogle, 18, affectionately referred to as “the D-Man” by club members, who won the Western Pennsylvania Unified Bocce Championships in March.

Fogle started as a member of the track and field team.

“I did shotput, the 400-meter dash and both relays,” he said. “Then a couple years ago, I became vice president and we started playing unified bocce. Last year we made it all the way to the divisional round, and then at the very end of the game, the wheels just came off of us. We finished in fourth place.”

Determined to get at least that far this year, Fogle said the team fought through covid-19 quarantines for team members and missed practices, even a two-game losing streak toward the beginning of the season.

“I kept thinking about how, in track and field, they always told us you had to ‘run through the finish line,’” Fogle said. “I told our bocce team that we had to play through the 2-minute warning. And we just dominated every game after that.”

The club’s two bocce teams earned the championship in a competition against clubs from Mt. Lebanon and South Park, after advancing past clubs from Deer Lakes and Norwin in the previous round.

“I think we all played really well for the whole season,” said Gwen Shilling, 16, a Franklin Regional sophomore who is the third of her siblings to join the club.

“Both my older sisters were part of the club, and so I was exposed to it when I was younger,” Shilling said. “I just fell in love with all of the kids and what the club does for them. So I really enjoy it, and I wanted to join the bocce team so I could be with them even more.”

Harris, the club’s co-sponsor and coach, said she couldn’t be more pleased at the club’s rapid progression.

“It’s been really awesome,” she said. “When we first started out with track, it was slow-moving. We kind of had to beg people to join. Now it just happens naturally, and the kids have made great relationships.”

Fogle said he loves playing bocce, hanging out and coaching his friends, “and helping them win.”

“The kids talk and hang out outside of school, and I don’t have to do much anymore,” Harris said. “It’s a lot of organic friendships, and that’s what it’s all for.”