Aidan Cockrell: On the ball

Aidan Cockrell has all the confidence of a star athlete. The Hall-Kent fifth-grader may not measure up to his peers on a height chart, but he works just as hard and doesn’t let his size difference bring him down.

“Not anymore. I dominate,” he said.

Born with achondroplasia, a type of short-limbed dwarfism, Aidan’s life is a little different from your average 10-year-old. He stands at 3 feet 5 inches tall, and his mother, Alecia Cockrell, said Aidan constantly has to navigate a world that isn’t built for a person of his height.

“We have things placed all around the house that may or may not be stools,” Alecia Cockrell said. “Outside of the home, there are very few places that the accommodations are made, and he either has to do without or manipulate a way to make things work.”

Like many boys his age, Aidan loves to play sports. He’s played baseball since he was 3 and more recently added flag football and basketball to the roster. Basketball is his favorite, as Aidan said he loves both the competition and the team nature of the game.

“He’s a great shooter, great ball handler, and he’s a great point guard,” said Owen Ferguson, who met Aidan while coaching flag football. “I would say he’s one of the best competitors I’ve ever met. He loves the game, loves to win, loves to fight.”

Ferguson said Aidan has all the classic hallmarks of a good athlete: He’s coachable, wants to help out his team and has a lot of drive to improve himself. That drive, Ferguson said, has brought Aidan to about the same level as his teammates of any height.

But Aidan’s still aware that he comes into every sport at a disadvantage.

“Every other time that I’ve played a sport, I’ve either had to work 10 times harder or I’ve had everything given to me,” Aidan said.

Watching her son compete over the years, Alecia Cockrell has seen her son overcome that disadvantage — but she’s also seen him feel defeated by it.

“I think [sports] has a positive and negative impact. I think the positive impact is just like probably what most parents say, and that is it helps their children learn to participate in teams and follow instructions from a coach … it gives them the opportunity to show their leadership skills,” she said. “The negatives being that a lot of times he comes home feeling discouraged because of something that may have happened at the sport. Also he at times has tried really, really hard and has expressed that he felt like maybe his best wasn’t good enough.”

Aidan tends to shrug it off.

“No pain, no gain, Momma,” he said in response to his mother’s concerns.

This summer, however, he’ll get his first chance to compete on an even playing field. Aidan has qualified for the first time to compete in the 2017 World Dwarf Games. The games will be from Aug. 5 to 12 in Ontario, Canada, at the University of Guelph.

Though Aidan refers to the event as the “Little People Olympics,” the World Dwarf Games work differently from traditional Olympics. Alecia Cockrell said the first few days are tryouts, where the competing athletes will be divided into teams to compete in sports such as basketball, swimming, archery, badminton, power lifting and track and field.

Aidan hopes to compete in basketball, soccer, floor hockey and pingpong, with basketball being his strongest suit. This is his first year competing, and he said he decided to enter “because I wanted to compete with people my size.”

Alecia Cockrell said she’s looking forward to it because the entirety of the World Dwarf Games will be built to suit people with dwarfism. In traditional sports, everything from the size of the equipment to the distance between home plate and first base adds an extra challenge for Aidan.

“I’m personally looking forward to him playing sports where the playing field is even. It doesn’t matter how many accommodations his coaches make for him on a team so that he can be successful on the team, the competition’s not really fair,” Alecia Cockrell said. “Everything about sports is basically unfair if you’re a little person in a big person’s world.”

Ferguson is acting as Aidan’s trainer between now and August. They don’t have the ability to bring in a team for practicing basketball, soccer and floor hockey, but Ferguson is working on Aidan’s solo skills and physical fitness so he can hopefully fit in well to whatever team he joins at the Games.

“So Owen’s challenge is not just to help Aidan learn the rules, but also to help train him physically for these things enough that hopefully when he gets to the [Games], he can try out for them and be chosen for a team,” Alecia Cockrell said.

The pair works together regularly on a variety of skills, and Aidan has his own independent workouts with dribbling, layups, weights and more. Alecia Cockrell said her son now frequently disappears into the garage to work out on his own and build up his strength.

“He’ll come back in huffing and puffing, and I’m like, ‘What have you been doing?’ ‘I’ve been working out!’ So I’m not exactly sure what his workout includes,” Alecia Cockrell said.

His training for the Games is something Aidan takes seriously. He even gave up spring baseball to devote more time to preparation. It’s a challenge to balance schoolwork with his training, but Aidan said he handles it pretty well.

“When I’m at school, I worry about school. And when I’m here and I’m training, I worry about training,” Aidan said.

In addition to training Aidan, Ferguson is working on making a documentary feature on him for a filmmaking class at Birmingham-Southern College. Along with a couple other students, Ferguson has begun filming and interviews for the documentary and is hoping to raise money to travel and film at the World Dwarf Games.

Alecia Cockrell said she and her son are trying to raise $7,500 to pay for trip expenses through a GoFundMe page, gofundme.com/aidanc, and T-shirts being sold through the Dream Funding Co. Etsy shop. When they arrive at the Games in August, she said she’s looking forward to seeing what her son can do when he doesn’t have to worry about how he measures up to his competitors.

“When he’s working to his highest ability, he’s not just trying to keep up with the others. When he’s working to his highest ability, he’s getting to see how he compares to other people just like him,” she said.

Aidan’s goal is a little more straightforward: “Winning.”