Westport saw a significant milestone last Wednesday, when a group of kids from Westport and Norton got together for a nice bocce match.

Amidst a large crowd spread out around them on the middle high school’s front lawn, 16 members of the newly-formed Westport Wildcats unified bocce team gave it their all over an hour of competition. The pep band played, the entire boys’ soccer and girls’ volleyball teams cheered from the sidelines, parents stretched to take photos and videos, and the smiles were huge. Team co-captains Zach Bernier and Hank Viera, both sixth graders, kept their players motivated and were a loud and encouraging presence.

She doesn’t remember what the score ended up being. But “the community support was amazing,” Dianne Pereira Aldrich, a middle school special education teacher and coach of the newly-formed team, said. “It was so great to see.”

Prior to this year, Westport had never had a competitive unified sports team and before Wednesday, had never competed intramurally. But educators have wanted to form such a team for some time, and last year began looking into it at the middle school as a first step toward possibly expanding unified sports across the district. Much of the organizational work at the middle school occurred earlier this year.

“Our special education department has really wanted to push for inclusion opportunities as best we can,” said Pereira Aldrich, who guides the team with assistant coach Kristen Bernard. “We’ve gotten a lot of support from the Westport Special Education Council and the administration and the support is crucial.”

Like the other teams against which it will compete, the unified Wildcats team is a member of a Special Olympics-organized South Coast league, and Westport will host Seekonk next week before traveling to Middleboro next month.

When Pereira Aldrich heard from Special Olympics that bocce would be the team’s first sport, she thought about it for a bit and realized it was a great choice — “It’s a great sport that children with any ability can have success with, so for that reason I think it’s great.”

That’s how it ended up working Wednesday, she said. Though keeping a close eye on the score wasn’t paramount, athletes who had been practicing since the start of the school year were laser-focused on the match and did their best to get as close to the drone as they could, she said.

“They had a great time!”