The USA Blind Soccer National Team shows how to play soccer even with visual impairment. NBC Los Angeles’ Gordon Tokumatsu reports.
Blind Soccer sounds like an oxymoron. Even its practitioners, like Ethan Kune, say so.
Playing since age six, Kune excelled in the sport in high school and was looking forward to a career in college.
"Almost all visual,” he said. “People said I was so visual that I barely heard, like, teammates talking to me.”
But life had different plans. A traumatic brain injury, which happened a year ago when Kune was 18 years old, took his vision, leaving him adrift and wondering if he would ever play the sport again.
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“Talking to my college coaches, telling them I was blind. I thought that was the end of the road.”
But on an overcast day in Carson, at the home of the LA Galaxy, Kune finds himself not only excelling in soccer again, without sight, but teaching new generations of blind and visually impaired athletes to reach their own potential too.
He and his teammates from the USA Blind Soccer National Team met with students from 10 LA Unified School District schools to show them how it’s done, complete with ball bearings inside the balls -- to make noise -- and support coaches to guide the players to the goals.
“I can partially see out of one eye,” said Edi Velasco, a junior at Narbonne High School in Harbor City who grew up in Mexico playing soccer on the streets. But retinal detachment took what vision remained.
He was one of several dozen students being coached by the Blind Soccer team. Like Kune, Velasco was stunned to learn that his favorite sport remained within reach.
“When they told me that, I was like, ‘That’s a thing?’ Yup. It’s a thing!”
“You really have to learn everything from zero again, which is not fun. But when you have people supporting you, it makes it fun.”
Also a fun experience for the high school players: getting tips and pointers from future Olympians.
USA Blind Soccer is scheduled to compete in the Los Angeles Paralympics, for the first time ever, in 2028. And Kunes is the team’s youngest player.
