For three days in October, Londoners Bill Mills and Dennis Bordin headed to Hong Kong to conduct a clinic in floor hockey for over 300 Recreation Leadership university students. The London pair were invited to conduct the clinic to help up-and-coming coaches learn how to successfully coach and referee a floor hockey program.
It isn’t the first time London has been called upon to share its knowledge. Bordin has conducted clinics in New York, Singapore, Japan and South Korea, while Mills has done clinics in Bermuda, Trinidad, Austria and Singapore, in addition to across Canada.
Mills also conducted a clinic in Hong Kong in 2009. Four years later, he was delighted to see that two people he had trained were now coaching a Unified team to the gold-medal game at the World Games in PyeongChang, South Korea (in Special Olympics, Unified Sports joins people with and without intellectual disabilities on the same team). Likewise, Bordin also recalls the training in Japan as having an unbelievable impact.
“Through a clinic, we prepped Japan for the World Games in Nagano in 2005,” Bordin said. “Since then, we’ve watched a world-class program develop throughout their country.”
Travelling to the other side of the world for a three-day clinic is no easy task, but Mills says the length of the journey was no big deal for him.
“I do this for the love of the sport and because I have a deep connection to it,” he said, adding that his goal is to better the sport. “It’s about world-wide consistency. When you have international competitions, as we do in Special Olympics, then you want to have the referees and the coaches abiding by the same rules and structures.”
Knowing that Mills and Bordin are volunteers (as is everyone else involved with Special Olympics London) makes their dedication to improving their sport even more extraordinary.
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