“If I can help somebody, if I pass it along, then my living shall not be in vain,” sang famed gospel singer Mahalia Jackson.
Retired educator and track coach Thomas Harrington lives by this lyric from the song “If I Can Help Somebody”— especially when it comes to motivating students.
Harrington taught health, physical education, and swimming for 37 years in Trenton, N.J. He also coached champion high school track teams and served as an assistant women’s track coach for 11 Ivy League championship teams at Princeton University.
“Like the classroom, if you can get the students to believe that, first of all, you do care about them, and, two, get them to trust you, you can do phenomenal things with any athlete, any level,” he says.
Harrington brought this philosophy to a new group of young people in 1986, when a friend encouraged him to start training athletes for Special Olympics track and field competitions.
“I’ve always come from the point [of view] that the greatest learning comes from the educator meeting the student where they are and moving them up,” he says.
His involvement continued for decades and, in 2014, Harrington served as the athletics commissioner of the Special Olympics USA Games, in New Jersey. The next year, when Special Olympics organizers were looking for someone to run the Unified track program in his state, Harrington was the natural choice. A branch of the Special Olympics, Unified Sports connects students and athletes with and without intellectual disabilities and puts them on the same sports team.
“It creates a bond quite often between the athletes and the partners,” Harrington says.
His program started with just a few events, but now has a state championship. “Unified events are in just about every school and track meet now in New Jersey,” he says. “You know what? That’s my baby.”
Harrington retired from teaching in 2017, but his work with Special Olympics continues. He serves as the meet director every year for the Summer Games, and, in 2022, he designed the first-ever Unified Athletics track and field competition to be held at the USA Games. Today, he serves as Unified track and field director for the 2026 Special Olympics USA Games.
Harrington’s dream is to see worldwide Unified games as part of Olympic sports. “It doesn’t matter what your ability or disability is,” he says. “Last time I checked, we all had hearts, and they beat the same way. If people look at people with their heart and not their eyes, that’s where unity starts.”
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