For two days each October, the west Valley city of Surprise becomes the center of Arizona's Special Olympics movement. On Oct. 23 and 24, 2026, more than 1,300 athletes from across the state will gather for the Special Olympics Arizona Fall Games, competing in swimming at the Oasis Swim Center and bocce at Mark Coronado Park. Competition runs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. both days, and the public is welcome to watch.
The weekend's centerpiece comes Friday night, when Surprise Stadium hosts the Fall Games opening ceremony from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. It is a free, open-gate affair built around the rituals that give Special Olympics its shape: a parade of athletes, the ceremonial lighting of the torch, and then a dance party that turns a minor league ballpark into something closer to a school gym on the last night of the year.
That mix of solemnity and celebration is not incidental. It is the same formula Eunice Kennedy Shriver used more than half a century ago, and it has proved remarkably durable.
Shriver's sister Rosemary had an intellectual disability, and the two grew up swimming, sailing, skiing and playing football together. But Shriver saw how little justice existed for people like Rosemary in the 1950s and 1960s, when children with intellectual disabilities were routinely shut away in custodial institutions, ignored and neglected. In 1962 she invited a group of young people with intellectual disabilities to a summer day camp in her own backyard in Maryland. She called it Camp Shriver. The goal was simple: find out what the children could do in a range of sports and physical activities, rather than cataloguing what they could not.
The idea outgrew the backyard. In July 1968, the first International Special Olympics Games were held in Chicago, and at the opening ceremony Shriver told the crowd that the Games proved a very fundamental fact: that children with intellectual disabilities could be athletes, and could accomplish far more than anyone had thought possible. Special Olympics now serves roughly 5 million participants and Unified Sports partners in 172 countries and territories, with more than 100,000 events a year.
Arizona's chapter carries that mission year-round, providing sports training and competition for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, along with health, leadership and advocacy programs. The organization frames its goal around the roughly 180,000 Arizonans with intellectual disabilities, aiming to help them be healthy, productive and respected members of their communities.
The Fall Games have become a fixture in Surprise, which has hosted the event at its stadium and sports facilities for years. The scale has grown along with the movement. When ABC15 covered the opening ceremony in 2022, the station reported more than 1,000 athletes from across the state taking part in softball, bocce and swimming. The 2026 edition lists more than 1,300, with swimming and bocce on the competition schedule.
What the broadcast captured that night in 2022 was less about results than about why people keep coming back. Joseph Thomas, an athlete, told the station he was going to try hard and win the gold. Jason Coar, 40, sat with his mother Jackie, who said she had always been by his side and drove him to Cactus Pool on Sundays so he could swim laps. Bethany Baum entered for a reason of her own: her son was coming of age to join Special Olympics, so she asked whether his mother could join with him. Christopher Emerson, already a veteran, put it plainly. "Now, I'm an athlete," he said. "It makes me feel amazing; it gives me something to do."
That same weekend, Special Olympics Arizona handed out its most inspirational athlete award to cheers from the stands, and the night closed with the dance party that has become a Fall Games tradition.
Alongside the competition, the 2026 Games will again offer free health services through Special Olympics' Healthy Athletes initiative, running 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. each day. Offerings include sensory room access and programs focused on health education, mental wellness, physical fitness, foot health and dental care.
Healthy Athletes has an origin story as concrete as the movement's own. In 1993, Rosemary Kennedy went for a routine dental visit in Wisconsin, where her dentists recommended removing all her teeth. Her legal guardians, Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Senator Ted Kennedy, refused and sought a second opinion from Dr. Steven Perlman, a pediatric special-needs dentist in Boston. Perlman restored her teeth without removing any. Shriver then challenged him to build a health program inside Special Olympics, and at the Massachusetts State Games that year he and his colleagues at Boston University screened everyone competing. Those efforts became the seeds of a program that has since screened more than 1.7 million athletes.
For spectators in Surprise, the appeal is simpler. The swimming heats at Oasis Swim Center and the bocce courts at Mark Coronado Park are free to watch, the opening ceremony costs nothing, and the athletes are, by any measure, among the most committed competitors in Arizona sports. Many train year-round with their teams and on their own, as Jackie Coar described, squeezing in Sunday lap sessions between organized practices.
The Fall Games run Oct. 23-24, 2026, with competition from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily, the opening ceremony Friday from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Surprise Stadium, and Healthy Athletes programming from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. each day. More information is available on the Special Olympics Arizona website.