Grateful for Goalball
by Beth
I am pleased to introduce Sean Edwards as a guest blogger today. After a retinal detachment compromised the vision in his right eye when he was nine years old, doctors prohibited him from participating in sports or any other physical activity that might cause another detachment. A decade later, Sean is attending Purdue University and participates in Goalball, a sport he is grateful for. Here’s his post.
by Sean Edwards
Erik Rodriguez of the Indy Pendants throwing the ball down the middle of the court.
I never really found sports interesting as a kid. I could watch football here and there if family was watching it. My dad even got me into watching hockey when I was 15 or so. But I couldn’t play those sports. Ha, me try to see a small, icy rubber disk that can be launched around a rink at more than 90 miles an hour? Good luck.
The script sort of flipped my junior year of high school. A resource teacher that year went out of his way to show me this unique sport made for people with a vision disability and assured me I’d be able to participate. Players all wear blindfolds, and the ball has bells inside to hear where it’s coming from. My resource teacher went on and on, and when he finally finished explaining I had only one question: what’s this game called?
Goalball.
Created after World War II as a rehabilitation method for veterans who had lost their sight in combat, Goalball is a 3-on-3 team sport that combines an offense like bowling with a defense of soccer or hockey. Teams of blindfolded players take turns rolling a hard-rubber bell-filled ball down the court at their opponents. When defending, a team will have to listen for where the ball is coming from and dive out to block the ball with their body, preventing it from entering their goal. The team with the most goals at the end of the 24-minute game wins.
We started a Goalball club at my high school and I began exploring various strategies. I learned that playing proper defense limited chances of taking a hit to the head. It didn’t take long for me to discover I did in fact have a competitive fire buried inside me.
And now I’d found a way to release it.
Since graduating from high school I’ve been attending Purdue University, and during my sophomore year at college it occurred to me that hey, we managed to create a Goalball club at Carmel High School. Let’s do it at Purdue, too.
On April 23rd, 2016, the newly-founded Purdue Goalball organization hosted its First Annual Regional Goalball Tournament. Six teams from various cities, including Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit, and even Cincinnati, traveled to compete in West Lafayette. I witnessed first-hand what that tournament meant to the athletes who participated. They weren’t simply enjoying a chance to get physical activity — they were grateful for the opportunity to compete.
It was on that day last April that I knew. This was it, this was what I was looking for all along. I switched my major to Sociology with a minor in Disability Studies. My goal is to someday work towards raising awareness of adaptive sports and make more options and opportunities available for athletes with disabilities to participate in them. With that spirit in mind, we’re planning to host our second Goalball tournament at Purdue in April 2017.
Sometimes in life, you don’t really know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. And other times, you don’t really know what you could have until it falls right into your lap. I’m honestly grateful to have learned about Goalball. Not only do I appreciate it for giving me the chance to compete, but it has opened up my mind to who I want to be.