KINGSTON – Mariely Sosa began running on safe smooth surfaces and in shorter races as a sophomore as a member of the Wilkes-Barre Area Unified track and field team.
Despite the challenges that come with competing with a significant visual impairment, Sosa has continued to develop her running career since then.
“I did track and field as a sophomore at Unified,” Sosa said. “I had never played sports before because of my eye condition.”
After running and long jumping in unified track, Sosa was encouraged by a member of the school’s boys team to try cross country.
Sosa ran last year, the first time girls competed in the sport since the Wilkes-Barre Area was formed through the merger of Coughlin, GAR and Meyers. She’s back for her senior year with the Wolfpack and hopes to take another step and for the first time have the five runners needed to score points at major meets.
“It was tough at first,” said Sosa, who often runs with a teammate by her side on the uneven surfaces of a cross-country course. “After I got used to it and people started to challenge me more, I started to like it.”
Even with support, Sosa has made her missteps.
“Sometimes I get very worried,” she said. “My vision is like a tunnel, I have no real depth perception, so sometimes I’ve fallen into a hole or onto some uneven surface. But I get up and keep walking.”
Sosa was born with Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), described on the National Institute of Health website as “one of the most serious inherited retinal dystrophies, typically associated with very early vision loss” and responsible for 20 percent of all cases of childhood blindness.
“It’s like cataracts and another disease combined, and light affects it greatly,” Sosa said. “I can’t see far, I can’t see close, and any kind of light affects it.”
The biggest challenges are changes in light that occur when turning into a wooded section of the route or returning to bright sunlight.
After her first cross-country season last fall, Sosa moved from the school’s Unified team – a Special Olympics program that brings together students with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities as team members – to the school’s Wolfpack track and field team in the spring.
Sosa, a model student, is active at the school as a member of Future Business Leaders of America and the Diversity Club, and has played a leading role in building the girls’ cross country team.
“Last year was the first time we had two runners,” said Paul McGrane, a veteran Wilkes-Barre Area track and field and cross-country coach, at the Wyoming Valley Conference cross-country media night last week. “This year we had 13 sign-ups and six or seven showed up for the first few practices.”
“A lot of them are from last year’s track team,” said McGrane, who credits junior high coach Anthony Dates for bringing more runners to the team. “They liked the camaraderie they had in last year’s track program, even though they didn’t really win a lot of meets.”
“They’re young, they just want to try it out and they’re having fun. So I’m having fun with them.”
