Why a DuPage County soccer player is the right fit for Special Olympics
The team's defeated.
No one wants to talk about what went wrong. Better to pout in the locker room and drown your sorrows with Gatorade.
That's where Ryne Stolarz comes in, the versatile athlete who can inspire morale, the guy who doesn't do pity parties.
"I've never seen him have a bad day," Kirstyn Weber said.
Weber had never nominated an athlete to compete on an international stage before. She knew it took not just skill but someone who could snap players out of a funk or a bitter loss.
"Just his attitude - it's exactly what they're looking for," she said.
"They" are the judges who recognized what Weber saw: a soccer player with a powerful leg and his team's cheerleader. After Weber's nomination and tryouts, Stolarz got an invite - received by only 14 other Illinois athletes - to the Special Olympics World Games in Los Angeles, where competitors of all abilities will represent 165 countries. The opening ceremony will be aired at 8 p.m. Saturday on ESPN.
"He can come into a room where they might have just lost the tournament, and he'll be like, 'guys we gave it our best shot,' pick everybody up if they're down," said Weber, the athletic supervisor of Western DuPage Special Recreation Association.
The 26-year-old, who lives near Wheaton, had to mentally pick himself up earlier this year when he suffered a knee injury at WDSRA's spring fling formal. A wheelchair clipped him, and Stolarz fell. He now wears a sleeve to keep the swelling down and does stretching exercises to iron out kinks.
"I was worried," he said, but just "a little bit."
"It's crazy," Weber said, that Stolarz will compete in the Games in a sport he took up only two years ago (she recruited him).
It's even more impressive that Stolarz has become the athlete who seems to excel at any sport he tries.
Stolarz has Asperger's syndrome, a developmental disorder, and coordination doesn't always come easily. But Stolarz says he likes to push himself. When he returns from L.A., his WDSRA volleyball season will begin. Then it's on to swimming in September. He also plays basketball and baseball.
But he feels a "good rush" when he takes the soccer field as a left and right fullback. Stolarz is the last defender between the opponent and his goalie.
"I like working as a team," he said. "It takes lots of hard work and dedication."
He hopes that hard work, the soccer tournaments, the Team USA training camp in Indianapolis in October 2014, and the indoor practices over winter all pay off with a spot on the podium. Last year, Stolarz's team placed third at the Illinois Summer Games, one piece of the hardware he's collected since joining Special Olympics at age 8.
"If you would have seen him when he was 8 years old, you would have never thought he would get this far athletically," his dad, Jack Stolarz, said.
He wants his son to work on finesse, like the Europeans footballers.
"These guys - speed and power," he says of his son's teammates. "So it puts a lot of strain on your body."
But there's one thing Jack Stolarz, who will be cheering on the Americans from the stands, wouldn't change about his son.
"He's positive all the time," he said. "I wish I could be like him."