Victorian Amateur Football Association: Prahran Assumption paying more than lip service to inclusion
DEAF players in a new Prahran senior women’s football team have battled marginalisation their whole lives, but a teenage girl and a seasoned footy administrator have joined forces to help them find acceptance and joy on the field.
Inner East
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AS THE siren sounds at the Lindsay Hassett Oval on an unseasonally sunny Melbourne winter’s day, Emily Hastie sprints across the ground, from where she’s been patrolling the halfback line like a lifeguard at the busiest of beaches, and takes up her position at the left shoulder of Prahran Assumption coach Wayne Oswald.
The pair — Hastie an articulate teenager, passionate about her footy and her teammates, Oswald a seasoned football veteran with decades of experience at the highest level, including time as Central/Sandringham Dragons region manager in the TAC Cup — are an unlikely combination.
Together, however, they are achieving remarkable things.
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Hastie is Oswald’s sign language interpreter and 10 of her Two Blues teammates are deaf.
Her fingers moving frantically, she delivers Oswald’s quarter-time instructions and, as the huddle breaks, she returns to the park and chases kicks for her side.
“It’s definitely hard work,” she said.
“I reckon I’m doing more work off the ground than on it. I’m trying to catch my breath as well.”
Hastie, 17, became aware of Auslan, the sign language of the Australian deaf community, while attending classes at school in Adelaide.
“I just enjoyed communicating with my hands,” she said.
A member of the South Australian under-18 state squad, she came to Melbourne last year to hone her Auslan skills at the Melbourne Polytechnic and played TAC Cup footy for the Oakleigh Chargers.
She soon became heavily involved in the deaf football community.
“I had an idea some of the girls might be interested in playing team footy,” she said.
“They want to promote deaf awareness, they are very capable players and, just like us, they love it.”
Hastie also had a run with the Prahran Assumption under-18s where she met Oswald, and he soon became her footy mentor.
One night, when discussing the possibility of starting a senior women’s team at the club, the pair hatched an ambitious plan.
“(I was) talking about it to Wayne and he said ‘I want to start a senior team, do you know anyone who wants to play?’,” Hastie said.
“And I said ‘I have a lot of deaf girls who’d love to play at a club’.
“They play in the deaf community and play about one game a year. They really wanted to be involved in footy because of the (interest generated by) AFL Women’s.
“When Wayne said he wanted to start a team, he said ‘I want to create a team of players that are outcasts’ and I said ‘the deaf girls are just that’.”
When Oswald first flagged the idea of starting a senior team at Prahran Assumption, he said it had to be a team with inclusion as its byword.
Indigenous, underprivileged, players with a disability — the team would not merely pay lip-service to the notion of inclusion.
“To the credit of the Prahran Assumption footy club, they backed me,” he said.
“I saw this as the perfect opportunity for something I’d had a longheld belief in.
“And it speaks volumes about the capacity of footy (to play a part in inclusion).”
At Hastie’s urging, Oswald touched base with the deaf football community.
“I had no idea, so I just said ‘you tell me what to ask’,” Oswald said.
“And they said ‘these people want to play, they don’t care about not hearing the whistle or not hearing the siren. So, they’ll find a way around it, they’ve been doing it all their lives’.
“None of them had ever picked up a football before because there were no opportunities for them.
“Now they are halfway through the season and the improvement is just phenomenal.”
So much so that, just last month, Prahran Assumption’s Emilie Biggar, Brittany Sanders, Freba Zayee, AJ (Ashleigh) Bransden, Monique Beckwith, Amber Hae Hae, Loz Sorono, Ricci Taylor, Heidi Beasley-Ellich and Taz Browning, with Hastie in tow, were part of the Victorian team that claimed a deaf football carnival at Yarraville.
Initially there were doubters, but any obstacle was quickly batted away with all the authority of a backman punching the ball from a forward’s clutches.
If the umpire’s whistle blows and a player can’t hear it, her teammates all raise their hands as a visual cue while Oswald uses written reports, emails and Facebook posts to reduce the amount of verbal communication he needs to do on match day or at training.
No hurdle is too great for a bunch of players who’ve been clearing them every day of their lives.
“It does take a lot of work, but you get a lot of richness out of it,” Oswald said.
“It’s one of the best things I’ve done and I’m a lucky guy, I’ve done a lot of things in sport.
“You talk about leadership groups, this whole team is a leadership group.”
And players will be players, whether hard of hearing or not.
“They (the hearing girls) were showing me three new words they’d learned (signing),” all swear words of course,” Oswald said.
Hastie laughed when it was suggested that proficient signing could well give the players a bit of an advantage on game day, although she refused to be drawn on whether there was any sign language trash talking going on.
“My players will be standing next to an opponent and we can talk tactics (by signing) and they don’t know what’s happening,” she said.
“We’re a team that is a little bit different and that’s why I love being part of it.”
Watching the girls in action, you’re quickly struck by how different this isn’t.
As players cross in the interchange area they quickly sign instructions to each other about the player they are picking up, at halftime Hastie and Heidi Beasley-Ellich head to the change rooms signing excitedly about the first half action and, following a hefty Prahran Assumption win, they all join the singing of the club song as enthusiastically as any other player.
“They probably cheer and shout a bit more than sing,” Hastie confessed.
“But that’s the whole point of this, that they’re not all that different.”
Footy is footy.
— with Tim Habel
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