Adaptive Sports Near Me × RCOS
Pitch / Summer 2026
Project pitch / RCOS open source class

A note from Karen Atkinson and Alec Tranel

Adaptive sports programs catalogued so far
0+and counting

Most disabled people will never find them.

We need engineers to build the public directory and the AI agent that keeps it alive. The data is real. The users are waiting. The code does not exist yet. That last part is you.

SemesterSummer 2026 / 12 weeks
Team2 to 4 students
StackModern, open, your call
LicenseMIT
00 / Start here

Adaptive Sports: Expanding Worlds Through Technology

1 in 4
U.S. adults live with a disability
Scattered
How adaptive sports info lives today
One place
What we are building

Adaptive sports can help disabled individuals move from isolation to connection, confidence, and belonging.

Yet many people never find these opportunities because resources are scattered, outdated, or hard to search.

A centralized adaptive sports website could connect
01
Disabled individuals with programs that fit their needs
02
Families and caregivers with trusted resources
03
Adaptive sports organizations with participants
04
Volunteers with meaningful ways to serve

More than a website. A bridge to community, purpose, movement, and hope.

When we make adaptive sports easier to find, we help people find their way back into the world.

01 / The gap

Between rehab and a sport, almost everyone disappears.

Someone breaks their back in a car accident. They spend six weeks or more in rehab. They get fitted for a chair, a prosthetic, a walker. They go home.

They will never play recreational sports again, not because they cannot, but because nobody told them they could. No one provided the information on how, where, who.

The American Physical Therapy Association has publicly acknowledged that physical therapists are behind the curve on adaptive sports referrals. The peer reviewed literature consistently lists awareness and provider knowledge as a top barrier to participation. The programs exist. The athletes exist. The connection does not.

The existing directories do not solve it. Move United provides a great member organization driven list, but as such, excludes the long tail of community based programs. The Kelly Brush Active Project is excellent for spinal cord injury, but is account based and disability specific. Neither of them are open, comprehensive, and maintained at scale.

2,095
Programs catalogued so far. The full count is bigger and growing.
0%
PTs who have never referred a patient to an adaptive sports program
0
Open access, organizationally agnostic, comprehensive directories that exist today

This project is for the athlete who never finds a sport. For the coach who never finds an athlete. For the volunteer who never knew there was a way in. You are building what they have never had.

Karen Atkinson Captain, US Army (Retired)
Alec Tranel Coach
02 / The hard part

Building an inclusive directory of small nonprofits is not a one time scrape.

Programs change names. Organizations merge and dissolve. Websites move. Contacts churn. Phone numbers go dead. New programs spin up in community gyms and rehab clinics every week and never make it into any national index.

When enough data on a site goes stale, it is deemed untrustworthy and users abandon the site. The project becomes a failure.

Today, the only way directories like this stay accurate is a dedicated editorial team and a spreadsheet. That model is why no comprehensive open directory of small nonprofits exists. It cannot be sustained at scale. We think this is a multi agent LLM problem, not an editorial problem.

The literature backs this.

Selected references / 2024 to 2026

[01] ACM Web Conference 2024 / WWW '24 BoostER: Leveraging Large Language Models for Enhancing Entity Resolution↗ doi.org/10.1145/3589335.3651245 [02] arXiv / 2024 On Leveraging Large Language Models for Enhancing Entity Resolution: A Cost efficient Approach↗ arXiv:2401.03426 [03] arXiv / 2025 MA RAG: Multi Agent Retrieval Augmented Generation via Collaborative Chain of Thought Reasoning↗ arXiv:2505.20096 [04] arXiv / 2025 Improving Retrieval Augmented Generation through Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning↗ arXiv:2501.15228 [05] arXiv / 2025 Crawl4LLM: Efficient Web Crawling for LLM Pretraining↗ arXiv:2502.13347 [06] arXiv / 2026 AI Planning Framework for LLM Based Web Agents↗ arXiv:2603.12710

Technology solutions such as LLM enhanced entity resolution, multi agent RAG frameworks, and autonomous web crawling are all active research areas right now. The surrounding pipeline is within reach of a focused student team. That team is you.

03 / What you build

The site. The agent. The guardrail.

You build the public directory at adaptivesportsnearme.com. You build the multi agent system that keeps it alive. Every change is gated by a human review queue. That is what ships in twelve weeks.

FirstThe site
adaptivesportsnearme.com

Find adaptive sports programs near you.

The front door to adaptive sports. Discover programs, learn the game, and get playing.

Enter city, state, or zip code
2,095
Programs listed
50
States covered
30+
Sports available
Featured Programs
Top rated programs across the country
View all programs →
Sled Hockey Featured
Rockford Sled Dogs
Rockford, IL · 61 mi
Equipment provided Free
Water Skiing Featured
AMP Adaptive Sports
Elkhorn, WI · 2 mi
Equipment provided Free
Multi Sport Featured
Chicago Adaptive Sports
Chicago, IL · 45 mi
Equipment provided $25 / season
Home Programs AMP Adaptive Sports
Water Skiing Featured

AMP Adaptive Sports

Elkhorn, WI · 2 mi away

Adaptive water skiing for athletes of all abilities. Boat, ski, and instruction provided. First time on the water? They have you covered.

Ages
Ages 8+
Season
Year round
Cost
Free
Equipment
Provided
Learn about Adaptive Water Skiing
New to this sport? We have you covered.
Getting Started with Adaptive Water Skiing
Complete beginner's guide
Adaptive Equipment Options
Your First Time on the Water
Finding an Adaptive Ski Program
ThenThe agent
01 VALIDATE links · contacts · fields 02 RESOLVE duplicates · aliases 03 SCORE freshness · decay 04 DISCOVER crawl · propose HUMAN REVIEW QUEUE nothing public until a human approves ADAPTIVESPORTSNEARME.COM open access · no login · no paywall
Click any agent job above to see it run
Auto tour next: resolve in 14s

Continuous validation across every entry

Link checking, contact verification, structured field validation. Across the whole index. Every week. Forever.

Live example last run 2d ago  ·  sample of 6 of 2,095
adaptivesportsiowa.org
checked 2d ago
200 OK · 218ms
wheelchairsoftball.com
checked 2d ago
200 OK · 342ms
asf-foundation.example.org
checked 2d ago
404 dead link
sledhockey.example.com
checked 2d ago
301 redirect
stand-up-and-play.example.org
checked 2d ago
200 OK · 189ms
adaptive-cycling.example
checked 2d ago
timeout 30s
across full index 2,089 ok · 4 dead · 1 redirect · 1 timeout 6 queued for human review

Entity resolution at scale

"Adaptive Sports Foundation" appears in seven states with seven different missions. Detect when two listings are the same program. Detect when one has fragmented. Detect when a name collision masks a real distinction.

Live example 4 candidates  ·  simulated locally
A · #00471
Adaptive Sports Foundation
Iowa  ·  EIN 471234567  ·  founded 2008
B · #01294
ASF Iowa
Iowa  ·  EIN 471234567  ·  founded 2008
C · #01803
Adaptive Sports Foundation
California  ·  EIN 957890123  ·  founded 1995
D · #02011
Adaptive Sports Foundation, Maine
Maine  ·  EIN 224567890  ·  founded 2009

A defensible public freshness score

Every entry gets a freshness score with documented decay between automated re checks. Surface staleness honestly on the live site. Nobody else does this.

Live example 5 sample entries  ·  simulated locally
Iowa Adaptive Sports
96%
checked 2d ago
Mountain Wheelchair Tennis
78%
checked 9d ago
Sled Hockey USA
52%
checked 31d ago
ASF Maine
28%
checked 67d ago · stale
Greater Boston Adaptive
8%
checked 180d ago · queue for review

Proactive discovery beyond the index

Autonomously crawl, find programs not yet in the index, propose them for human review. This is where 2,095 becomes 3,000 becomes 5,000.

Live example this week's finds  ·  6 in queue
Mountain Adaptive Sports
Boulder, CO
0.94
Wheelchair Tennis Club of Atlanta
Atlanta, GA
0.91
Adaptive Cycling Buffalo
Buffalo, NY
0.87
Stand Up and Play Phoenix
Phoenix, AZ
0.95
Vermont Adaptive Skiing
Killington, VT
0.82
NW Ohio Adaptive Hockey
Toledo, OH
0.61
5 high confidence · 1 low confidence (needs review) next crawl in 7d
Frame

This is infrastructure, not a maintenance tool. The directory is the visible thing. The infrastructure underneath is what makes it durable, extensible, and shareable with every other small nonprofit that needs one. We can build a one off agent or we can build something the whole community can stand on. We are choosing the second.

04 / What the summer looks like

Twelve weeks.One repo.Four milestones.

We do not run on vibes. Here is the plan, week by week. Day one is real. Week twelve is a real public deployment.

WEEK 01 to 02
Scope, align, and onboard
Environment up. Repo set up. The first two weeks are for scoping the project together, aligning as a team, and agreeing on what we are building before any production code. You meet Karen.
WEEK 05
First track in working state
Either the public site is live with the seed dataset, or the validate and resolve agents are running end to end on a sample. Demo to the team.
WEEK 09
Integration and review queue
Both tracks connected. The review queue dashboard exists. Real entries flowing. First freshness scores published.
WEEK 12
Public deployment and RCOS expo
Real users on the live directory. The agent runs on a schedule. You present a poster at the RCOS expo with metrics that are not fake.
05 / Why this matters

A snapshot of the data goes stale.The agent is how it survives and grows.

Adaptive Sports Near Me is already becoming a place the community can show up. Programs send us their listings. Coaches send us events. Athletes and educators share what they know.

That trust is fragile. A directory that cannot keep up with what its community shares is not built to last. It is a snapshot, and snapshots go stale. What the community needs is a place that stays up to date and relevant, today and ten years from now.

A team of one or two cannot validate, integrate, and surface thousands of contributions across thousands of programs, year after year. An agent can. The agent is what makes it durable.

If we pull this off, what we build is more than a directory. It is a permanent piece of infrastructure for a community that has waited a long time for one. The directory maintenance agent is the first proof. The athlete who finds her sport because of it is the second. The coach who starts a program because someone found him is the third. There is no end to this list. That is the point.

06 / Who you work with

Two committed mentors.Real lived experience.Both reachable.

We are running this project together. Karen brings the user perspective and the veteran community. Alec brings 10+ years of coaching and a standing weekly working session with the team. This is a real cadence, not a check in box. We are available to you.

Karen Atkinson
Karen Atkinson

Captain, US Army (Retired). Disabled veteran. Move United Warfighter Ambassador. Board of Directors at AMP Adaptive Sports. First Chair, Stand Up and Play. Director, Stand Up and Play Tampa.

Karen is the user. She brings the lived experience this project is built around. She will tell you when your design is wrong, your assumptions are wrong, and your language is wrong. That is the most valuable feedback a student team can get.

Alec Tranel
Alec Tranel

Children's basketball coach, 10+ years. Founded Adapt To Life, an athlete deployment fund for equipment, training, and travel. Started several companies related to managing real estate and small businesses. All supported by AI agents running across every team he leads.

Wheelchair user since age six. Alec is both a user of this directory and the technical lead for the project. He will be in working sessions with you, writing code, pushing for results that deliver on the promise. Building this alongside you, not above you.

07 / What you walk away with

Resume. Repo. Reference. Story.

  1. 01
    A live deployment with your name in an open source repo.Real URL. Real users. Recruiters click the link.
  2. 02
    Production work with autonomous AI agents.The rarest line item on a 2026 resume.
  3. 03
    Reference letters from a US Army Captain and a longtime adaptive sports coach.Specific. About what you actually shipped.
  4. 04
    A story most CS grads cannot tell.Your code can change lives. That is rarer than any degree.
08 / Who we are looking for

Builders. Not theorists. Curious. Self directed. A little impatient.

You do not need every skill on day one. Nothing is built yet, so you will not be maintaining someone else's code. You will be writing the first version of it. What matters is curiosity and the willingness to own a piece end to end.

This is open to a range of skill levels. Useful backgrounds, none required on their own.

  1. 01
    Web developmentThe public directory at adaptivesportsnearme.com.
  2. 02
    Python and backendThe multi agent pipeline that keeps it alive.
  3. 03
    LLM and agentsAPIs, prompting, agent orchestration. Beyond calling an API in a notebook.
  4. 04
    Data workValidation, entity resolution, freshness scoring.
  5. 05
    Design and UXIf the front door is going to feel like one.

Room for a project lead

If you want to own the roadmap, run the weekly cadence, and be the person who makes all of this come together, that seat is open. We will back you.

Two to four students who fit. Not a crowd.

The frame we are building inside
100% to the community.
0% to admin.
The agent runs the rest.

Not a slogan. Not efficiency for its own sake. The community is showing up with their programs, their events, their hope that someone will treat what they share with care. Every hour we put into this should land where the community can see it. In athletes finding their sport. In coaches starting new programs. In volunteers showing up. In families finding a way forward.

If this is your project

Pick this.Help us ship it.

The data is ready. The users are waiting. The code does not exist yet. That last part is you.

adaptivesportsnearme.com
QR code to adaptivesportsnearme.com
Scan or type
adaptivesportsnearme.com
Alecalec@alectranel.com—Karenvetsgetgoing@gmail.com

When you ship this, someone finds a sport. Someone starts a program. Someone finds a way back. That is what your code does.

Stay awesome,Karen Atkinson + Alec Tranel