GARDEN GROVE – Like many other Southern California kids on a warm Saturday morning, Sebastian Mancipe found himself on a soccer field with a ball at his feet. With beads of sweat emanating from beneath a faded blue baseball cap, he lined up a penalty kick, concentrating on the sound blaring from a radio within the goal.
Sebastian, sporting the customary cleats, shin guards and an innocent grin, listened for Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” before striking the ball. The ensuing cheers let him know that he had found the net.
At 15, Sebastian has been blind since infancy. He hasn’t let his disability slow him down, listing music and karate among his favorite activities.
“Some Sundays, I hike in the mountains up in Burbank with my bike,” he said. “I have a mountain bike. I like to do skating, like skateboarding and ice skating.”
On Saturday, he was able to try his hand – or rather, feet – at another one of his favorite sports. Commuting from Burbank with his father, Sebastian joined 35 other visually-impaired children and young adults at a soccer clinic held by Chivas USA and World Access for the Blind, a Long Beach-based nonprofit focused on the self-directed education of blind people.
Saturday’s clinic at an indoor soccer arena in Garden Grove, was one of the first in Southern California oriented toward teaching visually-impaired children the “world’s game.” Drawing volunteers and families from the surrounding community, the event taught the children how to dribble, pass and –like Sebastian – score, in a sport that had not always been accessible to the blind.
For organizers, the message was simple: make sure the children have fun, but also help them realize the opportunities waiting for them if they put in the willingness and effort to help themselves.
Brian Bushway, lead mobility coach for World Access for the Blind, believed it was all about self-preparation.
“When we’re at school or in the neighborhood and we see other friends playing soccer or doing any other recreational activity, how do we make that work for us?” he asked the group of children before beginning the camp. “How do we adapt whatever sport is for us? Because no one else is going to know what to do with us.”
Bushway, a Mission Viejo High School graduate, completely lost his vision at 14 from a condition known as retinal nerve atrophy. He eventually learned to deal with his blindness, relearning everything from skateboarding to soccer to basketball by exploring his other senses.
“The approach begins with being other-sensory minded and learning how to think like a blind person,” Bushway explained. “A blind person doesn’t have access to the same information. It’s about learning how to adapt to any other part of life. You have to figure out clever ways to get information that everyone else already has.”
At the camp, Bushway and other leaders showed that changing environments was as easy as placing a soccer ball in a plastic bag. Each ball at the clinic was tied in a common plastic bag so that the children could listen for and follow the rustling of the ball as it rolled on the field.
Juan Ruiz, another mobility coach, developed the inexpensive adaptation as a boy. Ruiz, who attended Buena Park High School, has been blind since birth.
“Somebody handed me a ball, and it was in the bag that they were just carrying,” he said, smiling. “So I just dropped it and whatnot, and I was able to tell where it was in the bag. I just left it in the bag and started kicking it.”
A more complicated technique advanced by the organization included a form of human echo location known as Flash Sonar. Employed by both Bushway and Ruiz, Flash Sonar involves a series of tongue clicks that allow an individual to orient themselves based on the reverberations of sounds waves off objects in the surrounding environment.
Bushway, calling the technique a form of rewiring the brain, said that individuals could learn Flash Sonar within a matter of days of proper teaching.
“It’s like the flash on a camera,” he said. “You click your tongue and it provides that much more information.”
Bushway has become famous for spreading the technique, using it to help him navigate in everyday life and participate in activities such as mountain biking. Still, he believed that blind individuals had to overcome “the stigma and fear” and rely on themselves to achieve.
The overarching message on Saturday may come to the children subliminally, after applying the clinic’s skills to everyday play, he said.
“I learned how to kick the ball, stack cones and make sure not to pick up the ball,” said Maya Graves, 4, from Irvine.
Carlos Lopez, 13, said it was a chance to learn how to kick stronger and play with other children.
“I usually go play soccer with my dad at the park,” he said. “Yeah, I never really played in a game.”
Carlos and the others might get their first chance at a second blind youth soccer clinic being planned by organizers for a few months time. For now, it’s a matter of applying the skills learned at a two-hour soccer camp to not only soccer, but also everyday life.
“It’s about learning how to adapt the environment to themselves,” Bushway said. “Then they can go anywhere in the world as opposed to getting society to change.”