Two blind athletes, Ada Nardin and Matteo Briglia, are on a mission for the Association of Italian Baseball for the Blind (AIBxC) in the United States to spreading the knowledge of their discipline, Baseball for the Blind. One of the end goals in this adventure for these two is to help Baseball for the Blind to be included as one of the sports in the 2020 Paralympic Games in Tokyo.
Ada Nardin and Matteo Briglia (AIBxC) got their show on the road in the US during the Beepball World Series, a tournament run by the NBBA (), where they met up to discuss how the two organizations could possibly come together in order to offer a more complete option for the visually impaired, with the end goal of pushing towards a Paralympic birth in 2020. The newly formed mission of the NBBA and the AIBxC aims to reactivate fruitful cultural exchanges between the corresponding Federations overseas in the fields of technology, orientation, mobility, job opportunities, housing policy, health care and much more.
Nardin's and Briglia’s trip has also been strategically important in regard to the contacts that they have been able to accumulate along the way, of which includes the likes Ed Plumacher’s . Thanks to Ed, the AIBxC (Association of Italian Baseball for the Blind) was able to organize the first official events on American soil, which took place in Central Park, New York on the mornings of the 17th and 18th of July. The event was a success thanks to the 16 athletes and 14 volunteers of which included the presence of (a major volunteer association for the disabled), all of which was documented by , a film production company that will be looking to follow the progresses of the discipline.
This project as well as the advancement of the sport is currently being strongly backed by the AIBxC, with the support of FIBS (Italian Baseball and Softball Federation), Major League Baseball (represented Dan Bonanno), MLBPAA (Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association) and MLBPA (Major League Baseball Players Association - Dan Foster). All the parties involved have already set forth a new schedule for the advancement of the sport of which includes events to take place in New York from mid-September till around the 5th of October, as well as a clinic/s to be held in Europe in 2016, all of which hope to help the visibility and awareness of this potential Paralympic Sport.
