Laura Benson: Reflecting on My Time at WAS

I have been a member of the Wasatch Adaptive Sports (WAS) community and team since the winter of 2016. Along with my day-to-day duties as a ski instructor for the Snowbird Mountain School, I assisted WAS’s Special Event Manager, Robin Cecil. Robin and I were the team behind the scenes putting together the Steve Young Ski Classic, WAS’s biggest fundraising event of each year. Seeing the impact donors have on the lives of our students amazed me. I was hooked! I loved what WAS was all about and I knew I wanted to help them in any capacity I could.

As the winter was wrapping up I decided to work in Jackson Hole for the 2017 summer, but I knew I wanted to come back next winter to work with WAS on fundraising and ski instructing, if available. I had my next moves all planned out and just like any young adult, you envision your future plans going just the way you want them to. Well, I was sure wrong and life let me know this by throwing me a HUGE curveball!

A very unfortunate experience happened to my family that summer. My mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor that affected her speech, eyesight and her ability to walk. With her rapid decline in health, I knew I needed to leave my job in Jackson Hole to be one of her caretakers. I attended my mom’s physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy appointments and developed a great appreciation for the folks that helped my mom regain some of her ability to walk and talk again. Even though I was going through this hard time, I knew that I needed to take my mind off of my current situation.

I applied and was eventually hired on as a part-time ski instructor at WAS and helped on the side with their special events team once again. I found that every time I went to work I learned that my experiences with my mom helped me better relate to and understand some of our students’ situations. I also gained a profound perspective on what the families, friends, and caregivers go through on a day-to-day basis when helping care for a loved one.

My mom ended up passing away 7 months later in January of 2018. A couple of months after she passed away, I was offered the operations coordinator position at WAS. I took the job with great excitement to have something new to look forward to. Losing my best friend and mother all while starting a new job was very hard for me, but being around the students and the people in the adaptive community somehow has helped me feel closer to her. My mom’s journey with her brain tumor and especially the journey of the students here at WAS are a daily reminder to me of the reasons why I go to work. I do it for the caretakers who spend every moment of their time and more serving someone else, for the therapists that give so much time and thought to help their patients, and especially the students at WAS whose lives are impacted positively through outdoor recreation.

Since moving into the operations coordinator position, it may seem like I’m just helping the program behind the scenes, but it’s the interactions with the people. It’s the comments over the phone or at the end of the lesson where a student mentions how WAS’s recreation has brought them joy, has given them hope for the future, has given them something to look forward to, and has helped them gain the confidence to face all the other battles of life. Or to the parent that thanks WAS for what we do because now their child is mustering up the faith and confidence to try new things all the time. These brief but powerful conversations have helped me realize the impact that adaptive recreation and therapy have on individuals and their families.

I am now continuing my journey by moving to the Bay Area and exploring graduate school to become an occupational therapist so I can help individuals just like the therapists who helped my mom and just like the therapists that support their patients when they participate in our programming. So THANK YOU to all those that we work with here at WAS! You are impacting more people than you know. Thank you to the families who persevere with great strength and positive attitudes through their caregiving roles. You are stronger than you know! And thank you to the WAS students who bring their smiles, passion, good days and bad days to their lessons. Every member of the WAS community reminds me daily just how precious life is and how we must not take life for granted. Though I will no longer be working at WAS, I will remain a lifetime member of the WAS family.