Opinion – Haja Vista: Lessons from an accidental athlete

“Sometimes I wonder, Filipe, what are you doing here?”, asked one of the athletes on my goalball team.

I wasn’t offended by my teammate’s doubt. In fact, I knew very well that was what everyone there must have been thinking since I started playing this sport, developed especially for people with visual impairments.

I will try to answer the question. At the beginning of the year, I started a journalistic activity that involves interviewing Paralympic athletes, mainly blind and with low vision.

It’s one thing to talk to a professional in football, swimming, running, who, for better or worse, I practiced one day and I have some repertoire from which to start asking decent questions. But how do you make a good interview about goalball, a sport that has a highly loyal and specialized audience? Just asking if the person is well trained for the tournament and if the objective is to win the three points and do as the teacher ordered is not valid.

We can learn a little bit by asking those who have experience. So I discovered, by hearsay, that in goalball three people play on each side of the court, in front of a beam six meters wide. Everyone is blindfolded and must send a ball that has a bell rolling or bouncing towards the opponent’s goal, ensuring that it touches specific points on the court. The same players attack and defend throughout the game.

But curiosity about this sport would not let me. Since I was always talking about goalball to people who understood goalball, I had more to play. And who knows, even I wouldn’t take it?

To get started in goalball, you don’t just have to gather some friends, bring some beers and start hitting the ball. Is there a school for those who want to play? I had no idea. I started asking people who were into the sport how I could have this experience and sending emails to organizations that support people with visual impairments to look for an opportunity.

It took a month for me to make it to the court for a first conversation. Even without seeing it, I imagined a huge question mark when I introduced myself to the coach saying I wanted to play. It got even bigger when I told her I was 32 years old and hadn’t played any team sports since my eyesight deteriorated more severely more than ten years ago.

Even with an unpromising future, I was welcomed and allowed to return to the next training session, which would bring together players from the Cadevi team (Support Center for the Visually Impaired) and Apadv (Association of Parents and Friends of the Visually Impaired). The activities would take place at the CPB (Brazilian Paralympic Committee) Paralympic Training Center, on the Imigrantes highway.

I didn’t train on the first day. I stood on the side of the court watching and, every now and then, the coach came by my side to give some explanations about what was going on. In the end, I was able to watch a game from inside the court, positioning myself behind one of the players, to start experiencing the sensation of the ball quickly approaching me.

On the second day, I learned what the basic goalball position is when the team is defending. The person doesn’t stand, as I imagined, with bent knees and open arms, as I remember football goalkeepers do. Instead, sit on the floor with your arms propped to one side and legs to the other. When the ball comes, you have to position yourself in the best possible place, lie down, stretch your arms and legs and wait for the hit.

I soon understood that the coach’s decision to leave me out of the tightest moments of training was very justifiable. In the first few minutes I played I defended a strong bounce with my face, which made me see stars again after many years. It took a couple more of those jackpots before I mastered the reflex of always shielding my face with my arm when the ball is close.

I’ve also started to learn how to do a basic shot, with a little run and a quick arm movement, which pulls the back of the body and lets the ball slip out of the hand when it’s low to the ground.

It took some more practice for me to discover that, despite each player having a fixed position on the court, it is possible for them to fluctuate, that is, to move quickly to another corner when shooting, to try to deceive the rival team, or even make passes for teammates.

A few days later, I started listening to transmissions of goalball games on the radio, the preferred vehicle for the blind to follow the sport, in a different way. I understood what the narrator meant when he spoke in a more technical way, saying that the ball was thrown from 6 to 1, that is, it was a straight ball, or from 6 to 6, a diagonal. More than that, I started to, in the same way as my colleagues, understand the progress of games watched from inside the court just by sound, understanding what happened by listening to the bouncing of the ball and the information given by the referee to whoever is in the game.

Another skill that is slowly developing is the perception of the speed of the ball and the probable position and height it will come to depending on how and how fast it bounces. One of the most enlightening moments was, when watching a practice, noticing that most of the balls that my teammates played bounced twice or, at most, three times, before being defended by someone on the other side.

The quest was to learn the rules and strategies of the game. I confirmed that I was right, there are times when we can only replace vision with the other senses and, in the case of goalball, it took a lot of hard work to understand it. But it happened that, suddenly, I was really enjoying trying to be more agile every day, facing the adrenaline of a shot at my goal and improving my auditory perception. I got a training shirt from the teacher.

In May, my team would participate in the Southeast Regional 2 championship, organized by CBDV (Brazilian Sports Confederation for the Visually Impaired) with the main teams from São Paulo meeting for a week in São José dos Campos. I didn’t think I should go. If it was, there was a risk that someone would decide to put me on the court and I would disrupt the team. The day before, the coach called me and said that it was very important for me to go, one of the athletes on the team could no longer participate and we were very short-handed, at risk of losing by WO. I canceled my appointments and packed my bags as best I could to help the team. As a result, I was in a championship with the dual role of journalist and athlete at the same time. The only reason I didn’t have ethical dilemmas was because I knew that, most likely, I was the most inexperienced among all the participants in the competition.

I wish I had one of those movie endings to tell, to have turned from an ugly duckling to a tournament star athlete and to have brought home a trophy. In fact, in the first match I entered, in the second half, I was so nervous that it took me more than a minute to get the blindfold on and go through the equipment check that the referee does with the athletes who are going to play. Then I didn’t realize that the ball would be given to me at the restart of the game and I almost committed a penalty for leaving it on the ground and delaying the progress of the game. My team even won one, but we didn’t get past the group stage.

My performance can be summed up in one piece of advice I heard from an experienced player: “As you’re old enough, you need to put in a lot of dedication if you want to have a future here in goalball.”

On the one hand, I understood an important message, that the environment I entered was highly competitive and, if I wanted to go to the next tournament, it would have to be at another level of play.

With that, I learned to admire the dedication of my colleagues and to understand the distrust they had towards me, which still didn’t have much to contribute. On the other hand, I feel that there should also be an alternative path, of practicing the sport in a more playful and more inclusive way, in which the personal development obtained each day of training counts more than the score.

Which makes me wonder who has space in this sport today. Most of the players I talked to came from special schools, attended by children with visual impairments, where the practice of the game takes place from an early age, which most likely favors the development of skills such as auditory perception and body awareness, useful for the court and also out of her. With that, I learned to be much more humble in relation to my ability to guide myself on a day-to-day basis, depending little on vision, knowing now that there are people who do this much better than I do.

I, who came from ordinary school and was hardly in rehabilitation institutions, only discovered the existence of this game in the last Paralympics. And, as a matter of fact, I went to research for professional duty, after the Sheet invite me to write a column about the games.

As an advocate of an inclusive school, where children with and without disabilities learn and have fun together, I am concerned about the lack of opportunities for the next generations of blind children to benefit from such a rich sport and of which Brazil is already a Paralympic champion. . My dream is for sighted people to try blindfolding them to discover how much we can do without relying on vision. After going through this apprenticeship, I believe that the transformation that the experience brings is one of the best lessons in inclusion anyone can have.

From a personal point of view, the result of this lack of opportunity is that my teammates said I looked like a late-night drunk walking around the court. Sometimes outside of it too. Blind athlete makes fun of teammates a lot, another important lesson I need to leave to anyone interested in the game.

It is worth remembering that the CPB seeks to carry out this initiation of children and adolescents into the sport with the Paralympic School, which takes place in the same place where I started my initiation into goalball.