Volunteer of the Month: Cody Dalton

Volunteers are the backbone of Special Olympics Pennsylvania. Without our volunteers, we’d never be able to provide competition, leadership, health and so many other opportunities to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities throughout Pennsylvania. 

Congratulations to Cody Dalton, Allegheny County, for being named our Volunteer of the Month for January 2024!  

Cody’s involvement with Special Olympics started over 20 years ago on an Air Force base in Mississippi. During summer 2004, the base hosted a Special Olympics event weekend. Athletes and volunteers headed to base and were paired up with airmen for tours, to stay overnight in the dormitories and compete in different sporting events. Cody was paired with an athlete who brought home a gold medal in bocce.  

Ever since that exhilarating bocce competition, Cody always knew he’d be involved with Special Olympics. Seventeen years later, Cody became the first esports coach for Special Olympics Pennsylvania.  

We had the chance to chat with Cody about how he started coaching for Special Olympics Pennsylvania, his passion for teaching others about esports, what motivates him in the world of gaming and so much more. Congratulations Cody on this accomplishment!

Over the years, I’ve always been into gaming and competitive gaming. Fast forward to the spring of 2021, I was working in sports marketing, specifically sponsorships. I was working for a tech company that was helping professional sports teams and companies get together and do sponsorship. Then, I got some exposure into the esports sponsorship realm. Then, in the weirdest way, I was on LinkedIn. I saw a fellow veteran posting that they were involved with Special Olympics esports in Oklahoma. I was like, ‘That sounds really cool. I didn’t know Special Olympics had esports!’ 

I reached out to him. Like I said, he was also a veteran, so we hit it off quickly… He got me connected to Oklahoma’s esports representative. They mentioned I had to go to Pennsylvania’s directors, and at the time we didn’t have an esports program, but there was word that a couple of folks in the Greater Lehigh Valley Pocono Region were interested in looking into that. I got connected with Bruce Bach and Jason Merola in Lehigh Valley, all while I was in Pittsburgh. 

We talked and they were like, ‘Look, we’d love to start a program, but we don’t know anything about esports.’ 

I said, ‘That’s great because I know a lot about esports!’ But I didn’t know anything about Special Olympics other than that volunteer opportunity. So, we decided to start a pilot program. This was October of 2021. We sent out an interest form to the Greater Lehigh Valley and Pocono Region, and we received five athletes that were interested. Since then, we’ve done a lot. We’ve participated in some national events, and we’ve hosted some events. We have weekly practices and it’s been really great. 

We do everything virtually on Discord. We have our own Discord server. Every Sunday at seven o’clock. We send out a poll to the group saying, ‘Hey, here’s the games for the night. Vote on what you’d like to play.’ 

Whatever gets max votes, we play in the first hour. Whatever gets a second amount of votes we could play in the second hour, but people are free to show up. If they’re not interested in playing those two games, they can still be on Discord and talk. They can play their own games, too. We just talk about whatever! We talk about games and we talk about life. I mean, some folks show up and they don’t play games at all. They’ll watch TV and hang out and that’s it. You know, it’s more of a social hour! 

We even have Unified Partners that are relatives of athletes and show up and play with us. It’s all about accessibility and inclusion across the board. 

When we started off, the goal was inclusion. With that in mind, we decided to start with a free-to-play game that can be played no matter what platform you’re on, which is Rocket League. Anybody can download it. You can play it on Nintendo, Playstation, Xbox or PC. It really opened up the opportunity for anyone to join us because it’s a free-to-play game. It’s cross platform, meaning that if I’m on Xbox, and you’re on Nintendo, we can play together without any restriction. Rocket League is a team-based game. There’s one-on-one, two-on-two, all the way up to four-on-four. It really was the perfect game for us to start, especially because there were already some competitions happening.  

Microsoft hosts ‘Gaming for Inclusion’ event every November on Rocket League. We’ve participated in that in the last few years… We had athletes make it to the finals of one of the brackets [in 2023]. We had folks broadcasted in a celebrity game which was really cool. There were like 450,000 viewers for that event…  

We also play other games like Mario Kart. We played this game called Brawlhalla, which is also free-to-play, cross platform, but it’s more of like a fighting game, like Super Smash Bros.  

Free-to-play and cross platform are the two main things that we’re looking for so we can get max participation… Our practices are probably 70% social gaming, just like us getting together, playing the games that we enjoy together, and then 30% competitive gaming. When we practice for Rocket League that’s usually competitive. 

Esports has given visibility to other Special Olympics sports that you can be a part of. There’s been a lot of that where athletes are making friends and connections through the esports program. They’re then getting involved in other parts of Special Olympics because of it, which is great. 

I want to give an opportunity for those that might not otherwise have it. This might be the only sport some athletes play for Special Olympics. We talk about their passions, and you start hearing about their happiness to be a part of something…  

I think there’s a lot of negative thoughts that people have about esports. You think about athletes that need this as an outlet. It gives validity to their hobbies and what their interests are, even if it doesn’t align with social norms or what society or families expect from folks… 

When you’re in it… When you’re at ‘Gaming for Inclusion,’ and you’ve got four teams that are competing to get to the finals, they want it. They’re hungry for it. It’s just as competitive as any other sport that’s out there. It takes coordination, teamwork, communication and a level of skill. It’s pushing them and challenging them in different ways. I think that’s what keeps me going. Knowing that there’s other people out there that need this and are going to benefit from it. I don’t see a lot of negative. I don’t see it taking away from anything. All I see is it’s a possibility to get people more involved  and to get people more connected… It’s an unlimited resource. You can easily get involved and you can participate from just about anywhere now…  

A big part of this is that it’s year-round. There’s no seasonal approach to this. It’s any week, any month, it doesn’t matter! We have something going on all the time…” 

We then asked Cody for some advice he would give to people interested in volunteering with Special Olympics Pennsylvania.  

“Don’t be afraid to get uncomfortable. I have to remind myself of how important my role is for this. It’s like it’s easy to say, ‘Oh, somebody else can take this or, somebody else can pick this up.’ I just have to get in there on Sunday and bring my best with me every single time. Sometimes it’s easy to forget the ‘why.’ ‘Why do I need to be continuously trying to do my best?’… It really does require full focus and attention. 

Don’t let the discomfort stop you from participating and doing your best because your best is good. Nobody is perfect, but your best is good enough. If you bring that every time, then it’s going to be a positive experience for everybody.