Every time Cora Roberts takes to the pitch with Niwot soccer, she stands out among the rest of her team. The 16-year-old junior has hearing loss in both ears, meaning she often has to communicate with her hands instead of her voice.
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Her coaches throughout the years have always made the necessary adjustments, with some going as far as to learn sign language to supplement what she can’t pick up through her hearing aids, but none have provided an experience quite like the one she had with the USA Deaf Soccer Youth National Team this summer.
For a few weeks, Roberts had the chance to practice and scrimmage with teenagers from all over the country, all of whom have some level of hearing loss. The experience, her mother Kelsey said, was eye-opening.
“When you’re the only kid with hearing loss, you kind of fly under the radar and you’re expected just to do it like everybody else is,” Kelsey said. “On the deaf team, they were very specific in how they communicated. They didn’t overly complicate words. It was direct. It was to the point, and they would often visually show them. She said that was the first time she could say, ‘What,’ and ask for a repeat without being looked at like you weren’t paying attention.”
Throughout the camp, the referees signaled calls through flags instead of the usual whistles, and interpreters were brought in to help the coaches and players communicate more efficiently. Cora said that was a far cry from her usual experiences playing club and high school, but as she’s figured it out on her own over the years, she’s taken pride in how she’s grown as a player.
“I learned that sometimes my teammates don’t see my hand signals so even though sometimes I can’t hear my voice, I have to use my voice a lot,” she said. “My teammates, they picked up on a bunch of signs, hand signals very fast and knew how to help me through it.
“I’m definitely a goal scorer from far out. I’ve averaged like seven assists. I like finding my teammates’ feet so that they can score. I love to drive one-versus-one. I like using my technical ability to go at other defenders.”
When Cora was young and first enrolled in kindergarten, her teacher at the time told her parents that she thought she suffered from hearing loss. Up to that point, they had just assumed she was just like any other kid, ignoring her parents when they were talking to her.
They took her in to see an audiologist and soon learned that chronic infections had done significant damage to her ears. Multiple surgeries in the years that followed yielded little result.
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“Her hearing fluctuates,” Kelsey explained. “Her hearing currently is the worst that it’s ever been with everything that she’s gone through. She got to the point where she was like, I’m done. I’m happy with my hearing aids. I’m happy with who I am. So we stopped.
“It is the structure of her eustachian tubes, her hearing bones and her middle ear that is causing the hearing loss. In her right ear, specifically, the hearing bones are so stiff that they’re not using sound correctly anymore. Her left ear, we’re not quite sure what’s happening.”
That hasn’t stopped Cora from excelling on the pitch. She’s been averaging 14 goals per season with her club team.
At the deaf training camp, the players bonded by trading around their hearing aids, and later worked together to defeat the U14 boys and U17 girls from the Georgia Olympic Development Team. Cora contributed two assists in the scrimmages.
This past spring, she made the jump up to varsity with Niwot but spent much of it on the sidelines with injury.
Head coach Stephen Dimit called her one of the Cougars’ best players in technical skill and ability, noting: “The ball just is a part of her, and she has that ability to just read the game quicker than other players. She’s able to kind of slip by an opponent that never sees her coming.”
He believes that if she can stay healthy, she’ll have a breakout junior year. Her hearing loss, in a way, has become an asset that few players her age will ever achieve.
“It’s really cool because when she can’t gain the information by hearing it, she’s one of the best I’ve ever seen at taking in the game visually and making those adjustments,” Dimit said. “It’s a fun thing to watch because of how much she really does read and see the game.”
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