Miss-Delectable
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On The Couch / Getting priorities right - Haaretz - Israel News
With all this sordidness catching the top headlines, quite understandably we needed an antidote. I got mine from an article in the Washington Post magazine that highlights Gallaudet, America's only university dedicated solely to the hearing impaired. The Bison, the only deaf college football team in the U.S., had been no-hopers, hopelessly and constantly losing games by as many as 50 points. The university's gridiron program was moribund. Until, the powers that be hired a hearing coach who knew no sign language and risked a potential major clash of cultures with the student-players.
The Bison, writes Brooke Foster, play football with their eyes. "Swivelheading," it's called, where players constantly turn their heads from side to side to scan the field to make sure they don't get caught unawares and hammered. "You can feel the thud of a tackle," Foster quotes one player, "but you're more seeing the thud. You see the tackles. You see the pain and the anger. We don't know what sounds were missing - we've never known them."
Back in the 1890s it was actually at Gallaudet that they invented football's famous huddle to keep opponents from reading their play signs. Nowadays, Bison players sign openly to one another on the assumption that their opponents won't know enough of their language to understand.
When the new coach, Ed Hottle, arrived on the northeast Washington campus, he'd never even known a deaf person. Initially, he encountered great suspicion that he might be given to make common uninformed assumptions about the deaf, especially, that they are somehow capable of less. But Hottle learned to sign (and a whole lot of other things besides), and though interpreters said his language was like a child's, he eventually overcame the suspicions that he was favoring hearing-impaired players over the totally deaf, managed his way through a gamut of emotional and other battles and now, two seasons down the line, the Bison are making lots of noise in college football in the sense that they are suddenly very, very successful. A most heart-warming story, very much worth getting acquainted with.
With all this sordidness catching the top headlines, quite understandably we needed an antidote. I got mine from an article in the Washington Post magazine that highlights Gallaudet, America's only university dedicated solely to the hearing impaired. The Bison, the only deaf college football team in the U.S., had been no-hopers, hopelessly and constantly losing games by as many as 50 points. The university's gridiron program was moribund. Until, the powers that be hired a hearing coach who knew no sign language and risked a potential major clash of cultures with the student-players.
The Bison, writes Brooke Foster, play football with their eyes. "Swivelheading," it's called, where players constantly turn their heads from side to side to scan the field to make sure they don't get caught unawares and hammered. "You can feel the thud of a tackle," Foster quotes one player, "but you're more seeing the thud. You see the tackles. You see the pain and the anger. We don't know what sounds were missing - we've never known them."
Back in the 1890s it was actually at Gallaudet that they invented football's famous huddle to keep opponents from reading their play signs. Nowadays, Bison players sign openly to one another on the assumption that their opponents won't know enough of their language to understand.
When the new coach, Ed Hottle, arrived on the northeast Washington campus, he'd never even known a deaf person. Initially, he encountered great suspicion that he might be given to make common uninformed assumptions about the deaf, especially, that they are somehow capable of less. But Hottle learned to sign (and a whole lot of other things besides), and though interpreters said his language was like a child's, he eventually overcame the suspicions that he was favoring hearing-impaired players over the totally deaf, managed his way through a gamut of emotional and other battles and now, two seasons down the line, the Bison are making lots of noise in college football in the sense that they are suddenly very, very successful. A most heart-warming story, very much worth getting acquainted with.