The Boys of Riverside: A Deaf Football Team and a Quest for Glory

Phillip Castaneda lived with his father and his father’s girlfriend in a small car which was usually parked across the street from CSDR. The family used the bathroom at a nearby Target and showers at a nearby gym. Phillip’s father, Jude, had been a talented wrestler who participated in the Deaf Olympics, but his career was sidetracked when he became dependent on drugs and alcohol and was arrested for domestic violence. For Phillip, homelessness exacerbated his existing struggles in school: because his native language was American Sign Language (ASL), he struggled with reading and writing in English, but football was his great passion. Before joining the Riverside Cubs, he played on a team with hearing kids, though he struggled to understand coach instructions.

On the first day of practice, CSDR assistant coach Galvin Drake and head coach Keith Adams worried about the fitness of their players after the Covid-19 pandemic cancelled the previous season. The pandemic had hit their students particularly hard—having lost their Deaf community when schools closed, many were isolated in places where no one beyond their family understood ASL. They had also lost the opportunity to work out as a group, and many (including the coaches themselves) were out of shape. Despite the fact that CSDR achieved just nine winning seasons since the football program began in the 1950s, the coaches are hopeful they could energize the team. During the first practice, Phillip and his teammates—including Coach Adam’s sons Trevin and Kaden, wide receiver Jory Valencia, and sprinter Felix Gonzales—struggled with their training.

The California School for the Deaf, Riverside was founded to support the needs of Southern California Deaf families who could not travel to the original California School for the Deaf in Berkeley. The school was chartered in 1949 and welcomed its first class of students in 1953. At the time, Riverside County was the center of orange production in the United States, as it had been since the Southern California Fruit Exchange (later renamed Sunkist) began planting oranges in the region in the late 19th century. The area changed dramatically in the years following CSDR’s founding, as the interstate highway system brought more traffic to the region and housing and strip malls began to replace the orange groves. By 2021, the 400 students of CSDR lived and studied in a largely industrial city.

In the first game of their season, the CSDR Cubs faced the Braves of the Noli Indian School, a hearing school located on the Soboba Indian reservations an hour south of Riverside. Like his CSDR counterparts, Noli head coach Jesse Aguilar believed that football was therapeutic for his players, many of whom had difficult family lives and struggled in school. Most of the players on the team were underclassmen who, because of the pandemic, had never played a game. The last time these teams met, the Braves won 20-14. This time, the Cubs trounced the Braves 68-0. Enos Zornosa and Trevin Adams scored three touchdowns each, and Phillip Castaneda scored in his first football game. Afterwards, Coach Aguilar encouraged his players to strive for the Cubs’ discipline and dedication.

Although there are obvious disadvantages to being Deaf in a hearing world, there are concrete advantages for Deaf players in football. Deaf players can ignore the raucous noise of opposing fans (often called the twelfth man) and focus on the game. They can also ignore trash-talk from the opposing team and attempts to call them offsides. In addition, studies show that Deaf people are better at sensing movement in their peripheral vision than their hearing counterparts, and are also better at picking up the movements of people around them. These visual strengths offer an important advantage in a fast-paced game like football. The fact that the Cubs clapped their snap count—rather than yelling the traditional “ready, set, hike!”—and signed their play calls also gave them an advantage over hearing teams.

Despite the relatively small stature of most of the Cubs, the team developed a reputation as hard-hitting and physical. Many plays relied on the steamrolling abilities of Trevin Adams, who was fearless on the field even in his flag football days, worrying his mother, Carol. Another hard-hitting player was Cody Metzner, whose physicality belied his quiet intelligence and academic drive. Some Deaf athletes argue that the tactile nature of Deaf culture, which sometimes requires speakers to touch each other to attract attention, leads to more physicality in sports. Others argue that the frustrations of being Deaf in a hearing world cause Deaf athletes to take out their frustration on the field. For players like Felix Gonzales, playing with other Deaf athletes helped ease the pain of being yelled at by coaches and players on his old hearing team.

In California, the football powerhouses tend to be large Catholic schools with significant endowments to fund teams, while the eight-man league is dominated by small, Protestant-run schools. The Cubs’ fourth game of the season was against one such school, Calvary Chapel. For the first time all season, the Cubs did not dominate the game. Trevin Adams was sacked in the first play, and the Cubs barely managed to punt the ball on fourth down. After a slow start, they fought back and won in the final seconds of the game, leaving Coach Adams cautiously optimistic about the rest of the season.

Coach Keith Adams was raised in Stockton, an industrial town that later became famous for filing for bankruptcy after the 2008 recession. Adams was born Deaf into a hearing family that initially struggled to handle his disability. At the time, parents of Deaf babies were encouraged to try to teach them to lip read; Adams struggled to learn lip reading, and as a result struggled with language development. When Adams was three, his aunt Mary, who knew ASL, taught him two basic signs. His response was so enthusiastic that Adams’ mother Linda immediately signed up for ASL classes. Learning ASL allowed Adams to excel in school, and allowed his family to connect with him on a deeper level.

Because the first known writings by Deaf people date to the late 18th-century, it is hard to know what life was like for Deaf people before then. Evidence suggests that, across many cultures, Deaf people were assumed to be unintelligent and, in some cases, subhuman. Things changed dramatically in the early 18th century when the Frenchman Charles-Michel de l’Epée began studying the signed communication of Deaf communities in Paris. He founded the first public school for the Deaf and helped establish similar institutions elsewhere, including the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. These institutions helped to solidify international sign languages and affirm the intelligence of Deaf people in the minds of their hearing counterparts. However, in 1880 the International Congress of Educators of the Deaf insisted that sign language should be banned in favor or lip-reading. As a result, even Deaf institutions like CSDR prohibited signing well into the 1950s.