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Gail Capezzone: Buddying Up

Gail Capezzone has a helpful hint for the correct spelling of her last name.

“It’s like pizza,” she says. “One P and two Zs.” She adds that people usually want to spell it doubling the Ps, and having a single Z.

At Chester Elementary School, where she is school secretary, students just call her Mrs. Cap. This her first year as secretary after the retirement of Pam Graham, who held the job for 28 years, and, for four years earlier, worked at the school as a substitute.

Even before Gail worked in the Region 4 school system, she was active in Buddy Track, a program originally started by Morgan Hines, a 2013 graduate of Valley Regional High School (VRHS). Hines started the program in 2012.

Buddy Track pairs young people with unique challenges with both adults and teen coaches for a chance to participate in classic track and field activities, though unlike a track meet, all the activities are non-competitive. Participants start at the age of five and go right through the teen years.

There are buddy programs in a number of sports and in a number of different locations, but Gail says the local Buddy Track is an independent organization. There was a two-year gap in activities because of COVID, but the program resumed this spring.

Gail got involved through her husband Pete Capezzone, who has been the track coach at Old Saybrook High School for some 30 years. He has also run track training camps for many years. Hines, a track athlete, reached out to him to keep the program going after she graduated and there was no student leader to take over.

Pete Capezzone worked with Buddy Track in 2014-’15 as did the Gail and Pete’s son John, a VRHS alumnus who just graduated from Southern Connecticut State University with a psychology major.

Gail says that, in addition, a number of Regional School District 4 personnel stepped in so the program could continue.

“The adults said let’s make a go of this. We can make this work,” she recalls. “It’s true what they say. It takes a village.”

For this year’s three sessions, there were some 23 player-athletes divided into groups, each one made up of athletes, high school students known as buddies, and adult supervisors. The groups participated in six different activities: relay running, high jump, long jump, discus, javelin, and hurdles. Javelin is done with a far smaller piece of equipment known as a turbo javelin and the cross bar for the high jump is rubber.

All the student aides and adults are volunteers; many of the latter group are teachers and other school personnel.

“I can’t stress enough how special the volunteers are. The get to work at 7 in the morning and then after school they stay for this; just amazing,” Gail says.

Volunteers are given suggestions to help them work with the participants, things like the importance of eye contact and specific praise for effort and accomplishment, as well as the suggestion that rather than starting sentences in the negative by warning athletes about what not to do, instead give positive instructions for what participants should be aiming to accomplish.

“Some kids are shy, they’re not sure what will happen; some might run in the wrong direction; some kids are unique learners,” Gail says.

But when she talks about the results, she has to excuse herself for choking up.

“It’s wonderful, magical really to see what happens,” she says.

Gail adds that when she sees youngsters in school the day after a Buddy Track session, they are enthusiastic about the experience.

“They tell me, ‘Mrs. Cap, it was so wonderful,” she says.

Though enthusiastic about the program, Gail was never a track athlete herself growing up in Enfield. She says her strength is the administrative side of things.

“Everybody needs a support team. I am just where I am supposed to be,” she says.

Before coming to Chester Elementary, Gail had a career that focused on administration at a large law firm and then at an insurance company, but when she realized her husband was about to retire, she thought a position that would give her some time off in the summer would be ideal, even more so because she loves the beach.

She worked for two years in the Guilford Public School System before seeing an advertisement for her present job, far closer to her home in Ivoryton.

“I saw an ad in the paper and the next thing I knew I was sitting in the superintendent’s office,” she recalls.

She got the job at Chester.

“This is a sweet school; I love it,” she says. “I like the interaction with the kids. The school is small enough that I know most of their names and I know them by sight.”

Gail is delighted that Riley Burch, who will be a senior at VRHS next year, and Ava Frost, who will be entering her junior year, have volunteered to lead the program.

The program is administered as part of the Deep River Parks & Recreation Department with several local sponsors as well.

“One father told me how glad he was that he found the program on the Park and Rec website,” Gail says.

The activities are over for this year but Gail says they will be looking for volunteers and potential sponsors again next spring.

At the end of each of the three sessions, participants get ice pops.

“It’s amazing how much they love that,” Gail says.

But at the end of the final session, there is more: pizza and a special gift donated by Miss Stacie’s Partnership, a sponsor dedicated to supporting opportunities for young people with special needs,

Miss Stacie’s Partnership provided Buddy Track participants with something that along with apple pie and hot dogs has become part of America’s vision of itself: a T-shirt, this one with Buddy Track written on the front.

To find out about Buddy Track for next year and sponsorship opportunities, check with the Deep River Parks & Recreation Department at www.deepriverct.us/parks-and-recreation-news or call the office at 860-526-6036.