There was good news and bad news for Adam Pierce and the rest of his Special Olympics Rapid City Area bowling team at Meadowood Lanes on Friday.

Pierce and about 150 other Special Olympics bowlers from around the region had a great time building teamwork, improving socializing skills and practicing sportsmanship during the Black Hills Area Special Olympic Bowling Tournament. Bowlers from Belle Fourche, Sturgis, Bison, Hot Springs, Newell, Spearfish and Rapid City all qualified for the state tournament in Aberdeen on Nov. 7-9. On Friday, everybody was a winner, regardless of their bowling scores.

"It's fun," Pierce, 20, said, jumping for joy and flashing a big grin after throwing his first strike of the day.

"Oh, everybody's having a great time," agreed Ron Stewart, a retired special education teacher who started the Special Olympics program in Rapid City in 1965.

All that fun comes with a big price tag for the Special Olympics Rapid City Area program, however, according to Monica Burgess, the mother of a Special Olympics athlete.

Special Olympics Rapid City Area, one of three Special Olympics groups in Rapid City, is facing a funding crisis because of rapid growth in the number of athletes participating. The number of children and young adults with intellectual disabilities participating has jumped from 30 to 60 in the last two years alone.

"I'm thrilled by the growth in the program. It's a wonderful thing, but at the same time, the budget is suffering from that," Burgess said. Burgess jump-started the local organization three years ago when her son, Drew, a 13-year-old with Down syndrome, discovered sports.

For many years, the school district, which was the program's biggest funding source, limited Special Olympics participation to athletes 13 years and older by necessity. Burgess thought younger kids with special needs also should participate in Special Olympics.

"I had a 10-year-old who was very sports-minded. No one else in our household is, so I started pitching balls to him. He could hit them," Burgess explained.

Today, SORCA focuses on athletes between the ages of 8 and 26. Black Hills Workshop and Suncatchers also run Special Olympics programs, targeted at adults and equestrians, respectively.

Under her tutelage, the program has expanded to include younger athletes, athletes who depend on wheelchairs for mobility and athletes with a much wider variety of intellectual disabilities than the Down syndrome that many Americans associate with Special Olympics. "We're supporting many more athletes than we ever have before," Burgess said.

Those changes mean that expenses have outpaced the program's limited funding.

"Rapid City Area Schools does provide $6,000 per year, and they are our largest contributor. That will cover one-third of our costs for this fiscal year," Burgess said.

Participation in Special Olympics is free to all athletes, but this year, SORCA will spend $15,600 to transport, lodge and feed its athletes on road trips. It also had to buy new basketball uniforms to replace ones that were more than 20 years old, leaving the organization with a predicted empty bank account by July 2009. It faces an $11,000 shortfall in the next fiscal year, Burgess said.

"After July, we will have spent every cent we have right now," she said.

Recent fundraising efforts have been spotty at best, and even last year's successful Polar Plunge, held for the first time in five years, only netted the organization $6,500, since local groups must split those proceeds with the state Special Olympics organization.

Because Special Olympics was a school-based program for so many years, the community never took ownership of it, Burgess said. She wants to see it become the self-sustaining, community-based organization it was designed to be. She is working to create a structure that will sustain itself, regardless of parental turnover inside the organization. "Drew is 13 now. Who knows what I'll be doing in a few years," she said. Burgess hopes to develop a board of directors, a volunteer base and a funding stream that includes grants, corporate sponsorships, new donors and more fundraisers.

Tammy Burrows watched her son, Jesse, throw a lot of spares at the bowling alley on Friday.

Jesse, 19, fell short of his personal game high of 201, but he has reaped big benefits from Special Olympics over the years, and his mom wants to see Rapid City appreciate the program as much as many smaller South Dakota towns do. "We should be just as proud of our athletes. It should be a big deal here. It's a big deal to all of them," Burrows said.

To learn more about Special Olympics Rapid City Area, go to

groups.google.com/group/sorca.