This Thursday at the University of Utah’s commencement exercises, Meeche White, a trim, 74-year-old former ski instructor, will receive an honorary doctorate for co-founding the world-renowned National Ability Center in Park City. She will be honored alongside fellow recipients, real estate magnate Clark Ivory and businessman-turned-faith-leader Elder Ronald A. Rasband, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Meeche will be easy to recognize. She’ll be the one squirming.
“I really appreciate what the U. is doing,” she says, before adding, “but the whole recognition piece is hard for me — people wanting to thank me for the idea of the facility. There are so many others who have done so much.
“I was just the pied piper.”
Gotta have one of those.
Meeche and her then-husband Pete Badewitz weren’t broke when they arrived in Park City on Labor Day weekend of 1984, but they were close.
They were essentially living on a dream. They’d spent the last three years in Winter Park, Colorado, teaching people with disabilities how to ski. Meeche had graduated from Florida State University with a degree in recreational therapy, which is what brought her to Colorado in the first place. She met Pete, a veteran who’d had his foot blown off in Vietnam and had adapted to become both a national champion ski racer for the U.S. Disabled Ski Team and a person who wanted to help others with disabilities feel how good it felt to get off the sidelines.
Looking for a large population base to start their own adaptive sports program — with a ski hill nearby — is what brought them to Utah.
That and qualifying for affordable housing at the Holiday Village Apartments in Park City, just a few blocks from the ski area.
“We found a two-bedroom apartment we paid $175 a month for,” Meeche says, the disbelief still in her voice 42 years later. “We took it as a sign we could afford to make the move.”
They started slow. Pete got a job as a janitor at the post office to make ends meet. A $5,000 grant from the Disabled Veterans of Utah allowed them to buy equipment. The kitchen table in the apartment was their office. They taught 45 ski lessons that first winter of 1984–85.
But word began to spread. This was no get-rich-quick scheme, there was no hidden agenda. The only thing these people wanted was to help those with disabilities see what they could do instead of what they couldn’t.
“Our real motivation was focusing on self esteem,” says Meeche. “Get people (with disabilities) in the outdoors so they can have experiences that make them feel better about themselves. It’s like a magic wand.”
Then, like dominoes, the pieces started falling into place.
Not all at once and not every day. But every time a roadblock appeared, when it looked like the fledgling adaptive sports program couldn’t possibly afford to move forward, something happened so it could.
The helicopter, for instance.
“It’s one of my favorite stories,” says Meeche, going back to the time in 1995 when the NAC bought a double-wide trailer that the Park City Mountain Resort agreed the organization could use as its headquarters next to the ski hill. But first they had to get it there.
The plan was to use a semitruck to haul the trailer to its location. But the resort was using helicopters to fly lift towers and would not allow any traffic on the mountain.
“We had the truck lined up and volunteer carpenters coming the next day to make the ramp and get everything ready,” remembers Meeche. “Everything was set but nothing was going to happen until we moved the trailer, and the next weekend was Labor Day, so that would mean another delay. I was fretting about all of it when I heard this inner voice saying, ‘You’re more than this,’ and I thought, ‘I am more than this, I’m not going to let this problem get me down. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’ll figure it out.’
“I wasn’t back in my office five seconds when the phone rang. The woman on the other end said, ‘I don’t know who you know, but the helicopter is done for the day. You can move your trailer.’”
When things like that kept happening, “They started calling it Meeche magic,” says Meeche, “but it wasn’t me, it was all my angels.”
The NAC grew like a teenager. Cycling was added, then camping. In 1996, a landowner anonymously donated 26 acres on the eastern edge of Park City for a proper headquarters. Then came horseback riding, Nordic skiing, rock climbing and numerous more sports.
Meeche’s band of supporters ballooned into an army. Fundraisers that were raising thousands started raising, in some cases, millions.
“When you see the dramatic change adaptive sports brings to people’s lives, it captivates people,” says Meeche. “They feel the mission in their heart and then they give. We’ve had so much support over the years. There’s just a lot of magic there.”
They all discover the same thing she discovered: “You help yourself when you help others.”
Today, the dream Meeche and Pete (who phased out in the early years after the couple divorced) created out of thin air is one of the largest adaptive sports centers in the world, annually providing over 32,000 experiences in more than 20 sports to athletes with disabilities.
But as much as things have grown and changed, one thing remains the same. The phone number at the NAC’s Park City headquarters is the same number that was assigned to Meeche and Pete when they moved into that $175-a-month Holiday Village apartment in 1984. Call 435-649-3991 and Meeche won’t answer herself, but her angels will.