Small Champions: Creating Possibilities Beyond Challenges
Every person deserves the opportunity to participate, belong, build confidence, and discover what they can do.
For nearly 30 years, Small Champions has been creating those opportunities for individuals with disabilities in Eagle County, Colorado.
We believe recreation is much more than an activity. It is a pathway to confidence, independence, friendships, health, and belonging.
Removing Barriers to Recreation
For many people with disabilities, participating in recreation requires specialized instruction, adaptive equipment, individualized support, and trained coaches or volunteers. These additional needs—and the cost that comes with them—can make activities that others take for granted inaccessible.
Small Champions helps remove those barriers.
We provide adaptive recreation, individualized support, equipment, scholarships, trained instructors and volunteers, and opportunities to participate throughout the year.
Our programs include adaptive skiing and snowboarding, swimming, horseback riding, golf, bowling, cycling, rock climbing, soccer, dance, gymnastics, hiking, fishing, rafting, summer camps, and more.
And we continually develop new programs based on the interests of our Champions.
Your Gift Creates Possibility
Every donation helps remove a barrier and create an opportunity for a Champion.
$25
Helps make participation more accessible.
Your gift helps support the everyday program expenses, supplies, and resources that allow Champions to participate and experience something new.
$100
Helps create meaningful recreational experiences.
Your gift helps provide the equipment, instruction, program support, and resources needed to give Champions opportunities to learn, grow, and connect.
$500
Helps open the door to greater opportunity.
Your generous gift helps support individualized programming, adaptive equipment, scholarships, and the specialized resources that can make participation possible.
Every Gift Matters
Whether you give $25, $100, $500, or whatever amount is meaningful to you, your support helps ensure that disability or financial barriers don't keep a Champion on the sidelines.
Your generosity creates opportunities that can last a lifetime.
More Than an Activity
Our goal isn't simply to teach someone how to ski, swim, bowl, dance, or ride.
It's what happens because they participate.
A ski lesson can build independence.
A dance class can create confidence.
A bowling team can create lasting friendships.
A summer camp can help a child experience independence from their family.
A relationship with a coach or volunteer can become a powerful connection that lasts for years.
“Skiing builds skills. Riding builds confidence. Relationships build everything else.”
Creating Belonging
Inclusion means more than being invited. It means being welcomed, supported, valued, and included.
Small Champions creates opportunities for Champions to participate in their community alongside peers, coaches, volunteers, and families.
They aren't watching from the sidelines. They are athletes, teammates, adventurers, artists, friends, and contributing members of their community.
Growing With Our Champions
Our Champions grow up—and they shouldn't have to age out of opportunity.
Small Champions is expanding its continuum of recreation and sports to serve individuals throughout their lives:
Small Champions: ages 6–12
Grand Champions: ages 13–20
Champions for Life: age 21+
Through our partnership with Special Olympics Colorado, we are also expanding opportunities in bowling, bocce, bicycling, skiing/riding, cross-country skiing, and snowshoeing.
A Community That Believes in Every Champion
Small Champions is powered by families, volunteers, instructors, community partners, schools, businesses, and donors who believe that people with disabilities deserve the same opportunities to experience recreation, friendship, achievement, and belonging.
For nearly three decades, this community has helped Champions discover abilities and possibilities that may otherwise have remained unexplored.
We don't want finances, disability, or lack of opportunity to determine who gets to participate.
Help a Champion Discover What's Possible
When you give to Small Champions, you're helping a person learn a new skill, find a team, build independence, make a friend, or experience something they never thought possible.
You're helping make sure no one has to sit on the sidelines.
Help Champions Excel Beyond All Challenges.
Give today and help create the next opportunity.
Small Champions transforms and empowers the lives of Eagle County, Colorado youth who are challenged with a variety of cognitive and physical disabilities. We teach these children that life is a rich and exciting place. Through repeated assurance and positive experiences our instructors and coaches help them grow, learn, and have fun.
Small Champions is a program for children ages 6 through 21 years with cognitive, physical, and multiple disabilities. We provide one-on-one coaching in a variety of sports and recreational activities including: skiing/snowboarding, bowling, yoga, equine assisted therapy, gymnastics, swimming, golf, nordic skiing, rock climbing, paddle boarding, art therapy, and more. We also offer several summer day camps for our Small Champions.
The program was founded in 1996 and has grown in the past 29 years from 5 children learning to ski to 70+ kids enjoying 14 different year-round recreational activities . There is no other program in Eagle County which provides a recreation based program for these particular children.
We believe that recreational education encourages independence and life skills that are otherwise not attainable for many of the individuals that we serve. The aim is to increase each child's personal development by providing well developed programs in which children learn to set, and then achieve goals.
Organization name
Small Champions, Inc
other names
Small Champions of Colorado
1996
Tax id (EIN)
84-1346280
Category
Youth Development, Recreation & Sports, Human Services
Organization Size
Medium Organization
Address
216 Main St 2nd Floor - Suite 200AMailing
PO Box 4691Eagle County, CO, US