TAMPA, Fla. — Zachary Mueller eats, sleeps, and breathes baseball.
“Baseball is my life,” said the 27-year-old, nicknamed Big Dog. “It feels good.”
Mueller, who has Down syndrome, played Buddy Baseball — a non-competitive rec league for Tampa Bay boys and girls with disabilities — until he aged out of the league. Now, he plays in a brand new rec league for adults with disabilities, A League of Their Own Tampa.
Kim Mueller, Zachary’s mom, said the inclusivity changed the trajectory of her son’s life.
“Fifteen years ago, when they started Buddy Baseball was when we really got him involved in baseball, and we didn’t know at that point, but he knew how to play baseball,” she said. “It’s a sense of belonging.”
Mueller, however, worries other people with disabilities might not have an accessible place to play, make friends, and feel included.
Tampa Councilman Luis Viera, whose own brother has an intellectual disability, is well aware of that issue.
“You know, I hear stories all the time of parents raising children with special needs, and they talk about the different challenges they’ve had, and one of the big things is, again, the things that many of us take for granted in our lives, and how that’s being denied to them,” he said.
Months ago, he asked the city’s Parks and Recreation department staff to examine its parks and identify which ones have deficits that prevent people with disabilities from accessing them and enjoying them.
“We found that the deficit was several million dollars to make those areas whole,” Viera said in an interview Tuesday.
Now, the city is working to right those wrongs.
In a meeting last Thursday, a unanimous vote by the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, on which Viera and his fellow council members serve, provided $3.3 million in funding to Parks and Recreation to make parks more accessible within Tampa’s Community Redevelopment Areas (CRAs), neighborhoods that have the greatest amounts of blight and need.
“What’s important about this is — this is areas like downtown, this is areas like East Tampa, West Tampa, Ybor City, etc., where you have a lot of everyday working families,” Viera said.
As Parks and Recreation Director Sherisha Hills explained to the Community Redevelopment Agency in the meeting, the supportive funding will allow her department to make the improvements much faster — many in the next five years — including playgrounds that are wheelchair accessible and autism-friendly.
“We have to make sure in our city to make accommodations for those families so that they can have access to basic necessities of life that a lot of us take for granted, and that includes playing in a playground,” Viera said. “It’s about respect, and it’s about dignity.”
It’s a big step forward for Mueller and her son.
Even though “Big Dog” found his place of belonging in the form of rec-league baseball, she hopes the city’s changes will help other young people find their places of belonging too.
“And that’s all our kids are looking for — just to be included, you know,” Mueller said. “It’s a good thing to see them happy. It’s a good thing to see them smile and laugh and just have a blast. It’s all we ask for.”
According to the city, these parks are slated to receive a portion of the funding:
- Rey Park in West Tampa
- Cuscaden Park in Ybor City
- Al Barnes Park in East Tampa
- Jackson Heights Park in East Tampa
- Cyrus Greene Park in East Tampa
