Frank Cain, U of G's assistant facility manager and business development officer, reached by email, confirmed the university was awarded the games for 2017.

"We are very excited to be hosting this event and hope to create an exciting event and athlete village on campus," he wrote.

Anderson said she expects around 400 athletes and their families to take part in the games. No new infrastructure needs to be built; the university campus has everything from accommodations to sports fields.

Anderson lives just north of Erin with her 17-year-old son who has achondroplasia, a more common form of dwarfism. The Little People of Ontario call achondroplasia the most frequently diagnosed cause of short stature. It's a genetic condition that occurs in every one out of 20,000 births. Although there are thought to be more than 200 distinct conditions leading to short stature, achondroplasia constitutes around 70 per cent of all cases of dwarfism.

Each year, she travels to the United States with her son to attend the annual Little People of America Conference. The National Dwarf Games are held during the conference each year, hosted by the Dwarf Athletic Association of America. The event is like a smaller version of the World Dwarf Games. Anderson said the event gives her son the opportunity to connect and compete with other people of short stature.

She said the annual event is important to her son. "For one week a year, you get to be 'normal,'" she said. "To be able to compete with people face-to-face, even to have conversations with people, that face-to-face really matters."

She said her son aims to participate in several sports in the upcoming games in Guelph.

There are no tryouts involved in joining the 2017 team. The Dwarf Athletic Association of Canada is compiling a list of Canadian athletes and encouraging anyone interested in participating in the games to send them an email at contact@dwarfathletics.ca. In 2017, the association hopes to field both a junior and open team to participate in the team sporting events.

Brittany Theis is a member of the DAAC committee and the sports coordinator of the Little People of Ontario. Over the next two years she said she'll be reaching out to athletes throughout the country with the goal of bringing more than 25 of them to the games in Guelph.

Theis said she's unclear whether or not spectators will be allowed to attend 2017 event. At some of the World Dwarf Games of the past, the general public was not welcome to attend, but the prospect of selling tickets for the Guelph event hasn't been discussed yet.

The games tend to be more of a community gathering of athletes than a sporting competition for public entertainment, Theis said. In previous games, there's been a fear among competitors and organizers that people will come out to make fun of the athletes or just to gawk at them. But who knows what the future games will bring, she said.

"The world is becoming more progressive, it's not what it was," she said. "You have all these shows on TLC that are really normalizing being 'different', so to say." If there's demand from the public to see sporting events like this, maybe things will change.

Anderson said she remembers spectators being welcome at the Michigan games and plans on having spectators in Guelph. She said she'll also be putting a call out for volunteers to help out with the games in the near future.

"For this kind of event, it's also about public awareness," she said. "You will be amazed the first time you see the competitiveness and the high calibre of sport."

Scot Bolton, Charlotte's father, said events like World Dwarf Games give his daughter the opportunity to test athletic abilities on a level playing field. At 48 inches tall, Charlotte is used to playing competitive soccer with girls between six and 12 inches taller than her.

"To see her competing with peers of her own size, it was really cool," he said, speaking about the games in Michigan. "She grinned so much, by the end of the first day her face hurt."

The website for the 2017 World Dwarf Games is still under production, but is available at worlddwarfgames2017.org.

cseto@guelphmercury.com