Jason Triggas earned the respect of his peers

Jason Triggas was not your average high school football player at Archbishop Mitty High School, in San Jose, Calif. He faced a unique challenge that few players confront -- being hearing impaired. Although he was born without a sense of hearing, Triggas, a 17-year-old graduate of Archbishop Mitty High, never let his circumstances hold him back.

As a four-year starter on Archbishop Mitty’s defensive line, he earned all-league defensive team honors in the West Catholic Athletic League, and the Palo Club selected him to their All Mid-Peninsula Team. Additionally, his teammates voted him as the Defensive Player of the Year. Along with his astonishing gridiron accomplishments, he maintained a 3.65 grade point average, achieving membership in the National Honor Society, and his contributions to the community included volunteering with the Moreland Little League.

Football has strengthened Triggas in all facets of life. First and foremost, it has taught him that he is a normal kid, and he has the opportunity to excel beyond his peers. Accepted to the University of California at Berkeley, Triggas has decided to attend Foothill College, a local junior college instead. At Foothill, he will be able to play football. During the next two years, he will work to meet the Cal requirements for transfer, and he'll also obtain speech therapy to retrain his brain after cochlear implant surgery.

Triggas, a scholar-athlete from the National Football Foundation Northern California Chapter, recently wrote an essay titled A Sense Not Lost, elaborating on his life as s student and how football helped him earn the respect of his peers.

A Sense Not Lost

The crowd roars. I feel the hands of ecstatic teammates patting me on the back. The smell of fresh cut green grass mixed with the taste of mud does not seem so bad since I just caused and recovered a fumble twelve inches away from the opponent's goal line. All my senses are keyed in to this one moment of exhilaration. However, when I say the crowd roared, I knew it was happening from the outstretched hands, the wide-open mouths and the banners being furiously waved. I could see the crowd roar, but I could not hear them. Hearing is the one sense I was born without.

Being deaf is a part of who I am, but it does not define me. The word "deaf" has often been defined by those who do not know me and by those who have a preconceived notion about what I can or cannot do since I happen to be deaf. A significant portion of my life has been spent redefining those expectations, but all in the course of me being just me.

Second grade was the first time I realized I was a little different. After my parents' hard-fought battle with my school district, I was allowed to attend my neighborhood school. This was the first time they had a deaf student in their system and they could not envision how a deaf child could be successful in such a situation. Those worries began to dissipate after the first spelling and sentence dictation test when I was one of only two students in the class to receive a perfect score. From an academic perspective, I was doing what was just inside of me, the desire to be my best and one of the best. From a social perspective, I did have a hard time at first understanding my new classmates since they did not know to look at me when they spoke, and they had a hard time understanding me.

I was very nervous and worried about how I would fit in. My teacher, however, helped relieve some of the apprehension by telling a story about herself to all of us. She walked up to the front of the class and put on her glasses to read a story. She then told the class that she needed her glasses in order to read and related this to how it was the same for me: that I could not hear without my hearing aids, and that although we both needed a little help with our senses, we both were still normal.

It took a few weeks for my peers to get used to my "accent," but it did not take long before they wanted me on their spelling team and, on the playground, their sports team. Sports became the most immediate common language with my peers, and I love playing football. On the football field the only thing that matters is getting the next tackle and helping my team win the game. Football has always been an avenue of acceptance, a way to show doubters who may at first laugh at my speech, that I am just like them, and in many cases, even better than them. Football has meant respect and in some ways increased understanding. "If he can play football just as well as a hearing kid, maybe he can do many other things just as well."

I have always known that I could do those other things just as well, if not better. I have never considered myself "handicapped" or let my deafness hold me back from accomplishing my goals. My greatest sense of myself came from my parents, who never treated me any different, never expected any less than my best and whose example of fighting for my rights to equal access have always served as an inspiration about the power of love and perseverance. I have many more goals to accomplish, the most immediate being to attend a strong academic institution that will allow me to continue to grow and learn, and maybe even impart a few lessons of my own. The main lesson is that being deaf means I am a person with one less sense than the average person, but with the same unlimited capacity to achieve my goals and to be just me.

NFF