WSOC: OVERCOMING OBSTACLES

By Rich Myhre

By Washington Huskies

October 9^th, 2018

Back in 1991, University of Washington women’s soccer assistant Amy Griffin experienced the elation of winning the Women’s World Cup as a player with the United States national team. She enjoyed a moment of similar joy as a U.S. assistant coach in 2012, placing first at the Under-20 World Cup.

Later, Griffin was part of a third World Cup victory that received less attention and acclaim, but for her was no less meaningful. Named as head coach of the U.S. women’s deaf national team in 2015, Griffin hastily assembled and prepared a squad that won the deaf world championship a year later in Salerno, Italy.

The outcome was rewarding, of course, because triumphs always are. But for Griffin, this one was particularly significant due to the many challenges she and her squad faced along the way. There was no outside funding, so Griffin ended up volunteering her time, and the team had to raise its own money for travel and other expenses. Funding shortages also made it difficult to get everyone together in the months before the tournament, so there were minimal practice opportunities.

Lastly, and this was no small thing, Griffin knew only a smattering of sign language, so communicating with players who had total or partial hearing loss was always an issue.

Yet despite the many obstacles, Griffin said she has come “to love this team. I’m helping a group of wonderful women that appreciate the work I’m putting in more than anywhere else I’ve ever been, and that’s been nice.”

Griffin, who grew up in Federal Way and played at the University of Central Florida before spending 1987-91 with the national team, has been a UW assistant coach since 1996. Her involvement with the U.S. Deaf Soccer Association was due, oddly enough, to some initial confusion about her ability to use and understand sign language.

Because she had a cousin with hearing loss, Griffin gained a rudimentary grasp of sign language. “I knew the alphabet and the basics like, ‘Where is the bathroom?’” she said.

Somehow, though, it was conveyed to association officials that she was actually fluent. “And that was a stretch, to say the least,” Griffin admitted with a laugh.

Nonetheless, former deaf association president Trip Neil ended up getting in touch and asking if she’d be the team’s head coach.

As Griffin recalls, “He said, ‘Hey, I hear you know sign language, and the deaf women’s team is looking for a coach. There’s a World Cup in 2016 and it’s in Italy. Would you like to coach them?’”

Griffin never hesitated. “He had me at, ‘There’s a World Cup in Italy,’” she said, laughing again. “I didn’t care who I was coaching. I thought, ‘What a privilege. And if they’re willing to try it, I’m willing to do it.’ For sure, I wasn’t going to miss out on an opportunity like that."

Of course, the reality of what she was taking on became clear when she began meeting with her players. For starters, they all had varying degrees of hearing loss. Some were totally deaf, but were generally conversant in sign language and skilled at reading lips. Others had partial hearing loss and used hearing aids, and many of these players did not know sign language or could not read lips.

At the team’s first training camp, Griffin approached a player and, using sign language, introduced herself. “I (signed), ‘Hi, my name is Amy.’ And she said, ‘Oh, I don’t know any sign, you can just talk to me.’ She almost bit my head off. … So then the next person comes up and I said (aloud), ‘Hi, I’m Amy.’ And she goes, ‘Um, uh, deaf.’

“I’d already started out nervous, and by that time I was thinking, ‘I don’t even want to have this first meeting. I don’t know what I’m doing.’”

Yes, that first week was filled with challenges and frustrations for Griffin and everyone else. At the World Cup, hearing aids would not be allowed to avoid giving a competition advantage to any player or team. So in preliminary U.S. practices the players took off their hearing aids, which meant no one heard much of anything if Griffin blew her whistle or shouted corrections. Conveying even simple instructions took time and patience, though the latter was sometimes tested.

“The team thought I hated them and that I was never going to coach them again,” Griffin said. “But I just didn’t know how to communicate efficiently with them. And it caused me to go for it because there was just no other way. It was like, ‘I don’t know what the heck I’m doing, but I’m going to try.’”

It gradually got better, sort of. During the team’s two one-week camps and then the tournament, “I was the one that was confused,” she said. “I was the one that was different. And I was the one that wasn’t getting all the information. So for three weeks I got to have a disability. … And I realize now that communication is as basic a (human) need as food and water and shelter.

“But I’m really blessed that I got to have that experience for such a long period of time because it’s made me a lot more empathetic. I always thought I was empathetic, but now I’m a lot more aware of trying to put myself in someone else’s shoes. Because the daily activities and the things you never even thought about suddenly become issues. From being locked out of your hotel room and knocking on the door and no one can hear you, to being unable to order pizza on the phone, to being exhausted at night because they’d been trying to read lips (all day) and they didn’t want to say ‘What?’ too many times.

“But even with all the varying issues going on, we still found a way to win a World Cup. It was truly a matter of, if we can figure this out we can do anything.”

Griffin’s assistant coach with the deaf team was Joy Fawcett, an 18-year member of the U.S. national team and a two-time winner of both the World Cup and the Olympics. The team ranged in age from 12 to 41, “and our (skill) level was all over the board,” Griffin said.

“For most of them,” she went on, “this was their first time being on a team with other deaf players. And the amount of understanding and family that happens from all of them being just like everyone else … a lot of them get emotional when they go home because (they say) this is the only place they truly feel like they’re at home. It’s hard to get them off the field. They don’t ever want to leave. And they’re always together.”

The tournament ran from June 18 to July 3 of 2016. The United States blew through the field of 17 teams, winning five preliminary games by a combined score of 22-2, and then besting Russia 3-0 in the championship game. Emily Cressy, a former Kansas University standout, led the Americans with 12 goals in the six games, including one in the title match. Casey King, a player from Bishop Hartley High School in Columbus, Ohio (she plays today at Capital University in Columbus), scored twice in the final game.

Because the U.S. came in with a 23-0 record in international play, “we were the favored team,” Griffin said. In a previous World Cup “the final game had gone down to (penalty kicks) against Russia. But this year we hammered everybody, which was awesome.”

With another World Cup coming in 2020, Griffin plans to continue as the team’s head coach. And she feels lucky about that because “I’m kind of addicted. I really love this team and I really want to share the story. … The players are unreal. They’re very outgoing, and they’re great role models for the 40 million deaf people (in the United States).”

Griffin began her own playing career back in the 1980s as a field player, but then switched to goalkeeper in high school “because basically no one else would play in goal. I thought I was a great field player, but apparently not as good as I thought.”

She was a walk-on at Central Florida and became roommates with fellow Seattle-area product Michelle Akers, who would later become one of the early stars of American women’s soccer.

As younger players, Griffin recalled, “we were huge rivals. We played on opposite club teams. She was the forward and I was the goalkeeper, and I’m sure Michelle got the better of me.”

At UCF, “we spoke two words to each other the first day. And then after three-a-days and living far away from home, we stayed up all night and chatted about our lives and about soccer and we’ve been friends ever since. It took me a good 24 hours to grow up and realize that rivals can be nice people, too.”

Griffin got into coaching right after finishing her college career and it overlapped the years she played for the national team. She was an assistant coach at Central Florida, Santa Clara and San Diego State, and from 1993-95 she was the head coach at New Mexico.

Her contributions at Washington “are hard to summarize,” said longtime UW head coach Leslie Gallimore. “Amy brings an expertise and an experience that are unique. The different environments that she’s played in and the different environments that she’s coached in are truly unique to her. There are so many things about Amy that benefit our kids’ experience and are just really invaluable for us. She really helps our team flourish.”

Griffin works with the team’s goalkeepers, but in a broader coaching sense “she does it all,” Gallimore said. “She’s very good with the (entire) team. She understands the game, she sees the game, and she has a great way of imparting what she knows about the game to the team. … She’s really good at analyzing problems and then helping the team solve them.”

Having spent the better part of her lifetime playing soccer, Griffin has obviously accumulated a trove of highlights. One she treasures continues to come around every year. It is the annual UW women’s soccer alumni game, and it is a chance for Griffin and Gallimore to reconnect with former players, some who go back to the inaugural days of the program.

“Those alumni games are very meaningful,” Griffin said. “We know every alum and we have a personal connection with them. So when they come back and want to show off their spouses or their significant others and their kids, and then show all of them who they got to play for and where they got to play, it means they had a great time when they were here.”

Those ex-Huskies have become “rock-solid, successful, kick-ass women,” she said. “So if you show up at one of our alumni games, that has to be one of the most meaningful times for me.”

But the foremost memory, without a doubt, is the pinnacle moment of winning the World Cup in 1991, the first in history by a U.S. national team. For Griffin, it began with the privileged opportunity of representing the United States while wearing a uniform of red, white and blue, and then culminated by hearing “The Star-Spangled Banner” atop a podium with a newly-received gold medal.

“I got to be on a team when people were rooting for the USA, and not many people get that experience,” Griffin said. Wearing the uniform “was such a huge responsibility and I didn’t want it ever to be taken away from me. I wanted to wear it well.

“And then being able to stand on the podium and share that moment (with her World Cup teammates). Yeah, for something that really gets to your heart, (that moment is the best), for sure.”