County Special Olympics hoops team keeps rolling

June 19--Back-to-back NHL championships?

That's all you've got?

Even that prestigious accomplishment by the Pittsburgh Penguins can't match the resume of one group of local athletes, who have won their state championship in four of the last five years.

That's the Lawrence County Special Olympics basketball team, which would have a five-peat on its hands but for an overtime loss in last year's finals. Coach John Maielli's team avenged that setback, though, earlier this month by claiming the Division I gold medal in the Pennsylvania Special Olympics Games at Penn State University.

Maielli has been coaching the team for 31 years, and while he has a few players that come and go, his core group has remained intact as it built its dynasty.

Cindy McCullough, Lawrence County Special Olympics program manager, says it's become a strong bond.

"You can just see the light in their eyes, they just like shine when they're out there playing," she said. "Just watching him with them, you can see the respect that they have for him.

"And he is so dedicated. They practice every Saturday, and he makes sure he's always there."

She added that at Maielli couldn't be with the team on the day they traveled to Penn State because one of his sons was graduating.

"But he was there by 8 o'clock the next morning, before the first game started," she said. "He could have just handed it off to one of the other coaches, but no, he's with his guys."

Maielli's passion for Special Olympics burst forth more than three decades ago, when he and his wife attended a ski weekend with his mother-in-law, who was in charge of special education at California University of Pennsylvania.

"As soon as I started working with the athletes, I was hooked," he said.

A few months later, he volunteered as a coach with Special Olympics in Lawrence County. After three years as an assistant with the basketball team, he took over as head coach and has remained in that spot ever since. He's even made it a family affair, getting each of his four sons involved. One of them, as his high school senior project, organized a tournament at Westminster College, and that event continues to this day as well.

Maielli's program starts in January, with weekly Saturday practices up until the state games on the first weekend of June. There's also the Westminster Tournament, and the team participates in a handful of scrimmage-like contests with teams from surrounding counties. It's all to get his nine players ready for the qualifying tournament at Carnegie-Mellon University, which is the stepping stone to Penn State.

But it's more than just exercise and gold medals.

"They enjoy playing with each other, and they also enjoy playing against all the teams that we face, because we see the same guys almost every year," Maielli "There's teams like Erie City and Washington County and Allegheny County that we play against all the time, and they've developed a lot of friendships with those guys."

Most of his players, Maielli said, are from New Castle, with a few from Ellwood City. And even though they won't get together as a team again until January, Maielli never worries about his guys getting rusty.

"Even at our last practice right before state games, we were leaving practice and they were making plans on where they were going to meet," he said. "They were going to go home and have some lunch then go meet and play some more. They play constantly."

(d_irwin@ncnewsonline.com)

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