Insight: Seeing deaf football on mainstream TV means so much to me and my son (BSL)

My wife and I are both hearing and we have three sons. Our middle child – Jamie –  was born with a uni-lateral deafness, and mostly uses spoken english to communicate. As a family we regularly socialise with several deaf families thanks to our local deaf children’s society and this has been a real eye opening experience for us.

Due to our sons type of deafness he was not eligible for support from the local peripatetic service when he was born and as a result has been excluded from many of the free services that deaf children are offered locally. Luckily, our NDCS society has been very welcoming and although we only know very basic BSL, we are still learning as much as we can on this journey.

My children are all football mad, as am I,  and they all attend a local football club which involves training and matches. Our son who is deaf in one ear – Jamie – manages well but gets understandably tired after his football sessions and will often go to decompress alone in his room afterwards.

We know that Jamie is managing so well with just one side of his hearing, and he has to compensate for this when he is on the pitch by using his eyes more. So when my son is on the pitch I know he is working harder than his peers to keep up, to listen out for his friends and the coach who are calling him and to understand what has been said.

Because he has a uni-lateral loss our audiologists have advised against a hearing aid for now as it would be too unsettling for his balance. We are still seeing what happens here as its likely the hearing he has will deteriorate in future, we aren’t really sure yet.

This may sound strange to your readers but I had no idea there was such a thing as a deaf football league until I saw the John Bishop documentary and learnt about his sons deafness and saw how he met a deaf football team. I showed parts of this documentary to my son and his eyes widened!

It was really refreshing for Jamie to see a mixture of footballers, using sign but also using voice too. He asked me lots of questions about this afterwards and so we went online to find out more about deaf football teams across the country.

Since then we have followed news of the England Deaf football team matches and I was blown away to see news of their match on Sky Sports News! I recorded this and showed it to my son when he came home from school and once again, his eyes lit up!

He started asking me if he was like them, how did they learn sign language and could he learn more signs too. He saw them as professional athletes that he had something in common with and this felt like a really big moment for him!

I have also followed news of the deaf commentators for BT Sport with keen interest and Jamie finds this all really exciting. He has asked me about finding a deaf football team that he could one day play in but I’ve promised him that first of all I will take him to some deaf football tournaments. I might shy in the background to begin with as I only know a few signs, but I will get there!

Jamie recently went on his iPad – I assumed to play games – but I then saw him looking at the England Deaf Football team website. I feel like his eyes have been opened up to a whole new world now. He had seen deaf children before but never professional deaf athletes and I can tell something inside him has shifted.

I am really excited by this and really grateful that deaf football is making an appearance on mainstream TV. It means so much to Jamie and it means so much to me too that Sport is making efforts to be more inclusive.

Jamie doesn’t tell us that he feels different but we know he must feel it sometimes. So, being able to show him people who have all sorts of deafness too feels so important for his self esteem and it’s even better that he has found some role models who are deaf and also love football!

This blog has been written anonymously as part of the Insight series – where readers are invited to share their story or news about their interesting job with The Limping Chicken. If you have a story to share please email rebecca@rawithey.com 

Image courtesy of i-stock photos.