A first glace the members of Sink It Deep RC may look a bunch of overgrown kids playing with their remote control toy trucks in parks in Riverview, N.B. But dig a little deeper and you soon discover the group so much more.
“You get that feeling of being a kid again for sure,” said Jason Sherrard, who started the RC truck club three years ago in an effort to get himself out of the house.
“I started out with three people and it grew and now I can be out around people it is like a family,” said Sherrard who struggles with social anxieties. He said he thought RC trucks might be a fun way to forge some friendships.
Moncton’s Pieter Du Toit, who recently joined the group with his son, said the connections he has made with the group have been life-changing for his family.
“Different types of people from all kinds of corners of society come together that would normally not get together if it wasn’t for this hobby,” he said.
Du Toit said the group is driven by core values of support and acceptance of everyone including his own son Eddy, who has autism.
After joining the club just a few weeks ago, Du Toit said the group welcomed his son with open hearts and minds and said from the moment Eddy picked up the remote, “I saw a side of my son that we always longed to see and it just popped out spontaneously,” he said.
“It is so cool that I can steer it with a remote,” said eight-year-old Eddy of his remote-control truck.
“It opened up my son to say ‘hey this is life – I can enjoy things.’ It gives him skills to cope with things that he could previously not cope with and it just comes naturally,” said Du Toit, who would like to see the group expand. He’d like to see a designated area within a local park in Riverview for the hobbyists to build an RC course for the public to enjoy. He says the site would be a place for people in the community of all abilities to come together to share in some fun.
Sherrard, whose own granddaughter has autism, choked up at the thought of helping light that spark in Eddy and in helping others overcome their own social anxieties.
“Anything that we can do to create awareness, anything that we can do to help – it is something right,” he said.
He said the group gathers every Saturday and anyone interested in joining can contact Sink It Deep RC over Facebook.
“You can’t go out with all these good people and be depressed – it is just not going to happen.”
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