Article by Felicia Xie.
From the moment you meet her, there’s little about Kim Kuipers that isn’t delightful. Kim is a chipper, easygoing 67-year old with a mop of silvery hair and an infectious laugh, her cheerfulness paired with an enduring passion to do good things for the world and to do them well. A veteran of the sport, she’s been dragon boating since 2013, starting with Hamilton’s Lively Dragons and culminating in the Para Dragon category at the Canadian Club Crew Championships. Last year (2024) she founded the Extra Special Livelys: a dragon boating team for paddlers with special needs.
Her personal journey with sports, however, begins far earlier. In the 1980s Kim was an avid skier who spent over a decade on the slopes, volunteering to teach special needs skiing teams. Eight years of dedication ended when she injured an artery in her neck and suffered what was essentially a stroke. Unable to walk, Kim was hospitalized for nearly a month. To this day, she feels sensations differently on the left side of her body, with reduced processing of pain and extreme temperatures. Despite these challenges Kim remains cavalier about the experience: “That’s why I like paddling on the left side of the boat, to avoid the cold!” Unfortunately, Kim retained long-term issues with balance, meaning skiing was out of the question. Dragon boating became her newfound passion after neighbour and longtime friend Diane Hinchelwood (whom Kim lovingly refers to as “Lady Di”) asked her to a club meet at Hamilton’s Lively Dragons. It was an instant favourite. “I’ve always loved the water,” Kim says, smiling ear-to-ear at the memory.
The welcoming environment fostered by Lively Dragons planted the seeds for Kim’s next big project. It started with a breast cancer team they were training with. One of the women had a daughter, Beth, with special needs. Kim recalls, “Everybody would meet Beth and everyone would love Beth.” Beth was also an incredible swimmer and regular at the docks, and when their team held a family and friends event, she paddled with gusto. Kim recalls asking herself: “Why can’t there be a team for them?”
Turns out, Hamilton’s Lively Dragons must have been asking themselves the same thing, because they were happy to collaborate with Kim and create a special needs dragon boating team. The Extra Special Livelys had their first season last year. The team practiced for 6 weeks in anticipation of the 2024 Hope Floats Welland competition, where they placed first in the para division.
Extra Special Livelys at the 2024 Hope Floats, alongside their gold medal.
Being able to practice and compete alongside non-para teams is a friendly reminder – to paddlers on both teams – that those with special needs deserve the same experiences as anyone else. Extra Special Lively boosts the confidence of its paddlers and opens the mind of everyone they race with. Kim takes extra care to integrate Extra Special Lively into the Hamilton Lively community as a whole. As she says, “We compete once a year, tents all together; we cheer for each other. At the end of the day they’re all part of the same team.”
Due to her balance issues, Kim doesn’t steer the boat, but she sits watchful at the drum. In fact, her old friend Diane handles the steer! Kim has also persuaded other neighbours to participate and recruits paddlers for Extra Special Livelys through word-of-mouth. Her and her team do an incredible amount of outreach in the community: Beth’s mom connected the team to the Special Olympics to find interested potential paddlers and access their various para-sports resources. One of their paddlers is on the board for Down Syndrome and has invited Kim to participate in a Down Syndrome walk.
The group exhibits wonderful support and team chemistry. They’ve gained paddlers, from 13-14 in their first year to 16 for the upcoming season. “Every single person from the first year came back the second year.” Kim says happily. As if that weren’t encouraging enough, the team “got a lot of really good positive feedback from the families.” One woman’s delighted parents confided to Kim: “she talks about it all the time.” Others said “This was such a positive experience” and hoped for many more years of fun on the water.
The impact she’s making on dragon boating as a whole is undeniable. Kim is a vocal champion of accessibility, stemming from personal struggles as well as those of her close friends. These struggles have real impacts – financial, physical, and psychological. Kim vividly remembers having to reschedule a flight and pay extra because her friend in a wheelchair was severely underaccomodated by the flight crew. Kim and the attendants ended up having to assist her friend down a flight of stairs (from the plane to the tarmac), which is both incredibly dangerous and unnecessarily humiliating for the wheelchair user. Similarly, when Kim first attended the 2023 Thailand nationals as part of the para team, they found the accommodations lacking, so her team went to the IDBF and petitioned for a change. The IDBF was very helpful and clearly wanted the para paddlers to participate. It was the first time they’d hosted para paddlers, so the IDBF probably didn’t know what to expect, underscoring the importance of having voices like Kim on the frontline. With great cheer, modesty, and perseverance, she’s making the world a kinder and better place.
Through her efforts, Kim is promoting a new generation of thoughtfulness and accommodation. We hope to see her and the Extra Special Lively Team catching waves and having a blast at future competitions!
If any coaches or clubs are interested in hearing more about our Special Needs Dragon Boat program, please contact paracommittee@dragonboat.ca to be connected to Kim.