During a awards banquet held in Aurora on October 23, Peterborough coach and longtime advocate for female athletes Debbie Quinlan was named Special Olympics Ontario’s 2025 Coach of the Year.
The provincial award recognizes a coach who has demonstrated exceptional leadership while playing an integral role in promoting and developing the sports programs. According to Special Olympics Ontario, Quinlan, who coaches swimming, soccer, and basketball, “exemplifies what it means to coach with purpose, patience, and heart.”
“This award I received really is to honour our Special Olympians that I’ve coached over the years because they demonstrate such passion, determination, commitment, and love of sport,” Quinlan says. “That has brought the best out of me and makes me a better swim coach. I truly love what I do.”
In operation for more than 50 years, Special Olympics is the world’s largest movement dedicated to promoting inclusion through sport for people with intellectual disabilities. The Peterborough chapter provides year-round training in a number of sports, allowing athletes to play at their own level and giving them the opportunity to compete at a provincial, national, and world level.
“Peterborough is really flourishing and doing well in Special Olympics,” Quinlan says.
“What’s most important to our Special Olympians throughout Peterborough, Ontario, and other communities is that they feel like they’re part of a family. What’s so rewarding is these athletes demonstrate what the true meaning of sport is all about. They have this love of sport, they have a love of competing, and they have a love of cheering on their own Special Olympians.”
Quinlan began coaching with Special Olympics over 22 years ago when her daughter Kacee, who has Downs syndrome, showed an interest in competitive swimming. With Quinlan’s own background as a teacher and competitive swimmer, she asked if she could be a coach, and later that year, took over as head coach.
“I’ve never looked back since then,” she says. “The wonderful thing about Special Olympics is you never see the disability; you only see the ability. You see the person for who they are and what gifts they bring to the sport. It’s such a rewarding experience.”
She then began coaching the mixed-league soccer team for the 2018 nationals in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and it was there she noticed the wide discrepancy between male and female players on the team.
“I saw that there was a huge need for women’s soccer,” Quinlan says. “I felt that we were going to lose our women in Special Olympic sports at a higher level because there weren’t as many women competing.”
She returned from the nationals and asked the organizations if they would promote women’s soccer. By 2019, Special Olympics Ontario hosted the first soccer tournament in Toronto, and this past summer, the organization supported the first women’s soccer division at the Special Olympic provincial games.
Peterborough’s team made history earning a gold medal after going undefeated throughout the tournament.
“When we would compete in different events or tournaments, we saw how many other women from other communities really wished their community had a women’s soccer team,” Quinlan says.
Just last year, she began noticing the same unbalanced ratio between men and women while her daughter played on the basketball team.
She approached the Peterborough executive and encouraged her husband Bev, who is the award-winning coach of Peterborough Challenger Baseball, to head a new women’s team, for which Quinlan is now the assistant coach.
That same team, called the Blazers — “because they were trailblazers,” says Quinlan — won the 2025 Team of the Year award from Special Olympics Ontario for playing an important part in advancing women’s sport within Special Olympics.
“Our goal is to spread the word so that other communities will be inspired to start other women’s basketball teams so that one day we can go to a provincial, qualify as a women’s team, and compete against other women,” says Quinlan. “That would be our dream.”
She explains that she will keep advocating for more women in sport within Special Olympics because “sport is a life-long experience” for the athletes — some of whom are into their 60s — and yet the higher division of competition in mixed leagues continues to have fewer women.
“It can be very physical when you’re playing with men, but we want to feature the women and show and instill in them that they do have the abilities, they can blossom, they can experience a higher level of playing if given the opportunity,” she says. “When you’re able to play with other women, there’s a real camaraderie but you’re also in appreciation of each other as athletes.”
As the recipient of the Special Olympics Ontario award for the Coach of the Year, Quinlan is also a finalist for the Special Olympics Canada 2025 awards, which will be broadcast on TSN at 7 p.m. this Thursday (November 6).
“This award is not just a recognition of my efforts over the years, but it’s really a testament to the collective commitment and passion of all the Special Olympic coaches and team managers that I’ve coached with and learned from over the years,” she says.
“They really have inspired me and motivated me to provide the best possible opportunities and experiences for athletes while making a difference in their lives.”
