Energized and raucous, it was largely a pep rally like any other. Teams introduced. Cheerleaders cheering. Students screaming. The sound was deafening, even if in fact nearly all the attendees were already deaf.
The differences in the packed Austin gym on the Thursday before the Texas School for the Deaf’s homecoming game were subtle but noticeable. No band. No chanting.
Sign language more than made up for that.
That’s the rule at TSD, the only Deaf high school in Texas. Although there’s a wide range of hearing loss among the students and staff, American Sign Language is the only allowed means of communication.
Except on the football field. There, anything goes.
Pad-popping hits are a universal language. Players who can talk, talk loudly and emphatically—the Rangers even got flagged in a recent season for “cussing.” Music blares in the weight room, the more bass the better. But communication is mostly by sign language, the intense looks on coach’s faces and the use of other senses sharpened by hearing loss.
Players can’t watch their opponent and coaches simultaneously, so signing from the sidelines isn’t an option on the field. They can’t hear opponents changing plays to better counter or attack, or teammates shouting adjustments. Paul Hubbard, a player at Gallaudet College, a Deaf school in Washington, D.C., invented the football huddle in the early 1890s to prevent opponents from stealing signs.
TSD’s Kenneth Montanez, who shared head coaching duties with Archie Savannah Jr. in 2023, played multiple sports growing up but always loved football. He played five years at what is now Gallaudet University and kept feeding his passion by playing semipro football and rugby.
Texas School for the Deaf players burst onto the field through smoke and confetti.
Scott Van Osdol
Family members escort Lev Shayman, a member of the homecoming court, onto the field.
Scott Van Osdol
“It’s more than physical for them,” writes Montanez, who lost his hearing as a baby in New York City. “It teaches self-discipline and how to achieve things as a community.”
The Rangers’ annual 10-game schedule includes at least two games against other Deaf state schools, one home and one away. The host school puts on a dinner and dance for the visitors, with the idea of forming a nationwide network of peers who face similar obstacles.
Ursa Rewolinski’s network was closer to home. Her godfather is former TSD head coach Andy Bonheyo, and she grew up in Austin as a fan of the football team. By age 3, she could identify NFL teams playing on TV by their helmets. After graduating from the Maryland School for the Deaf, she returned to teach at TSD in 2019, her football passion evident but unfulfilled.
“Everybody’s like, ‘Why are you not a coach?’ You know what, the door hadn’t really opened up for me,” she says through an ASL interpreter. “And so, long story short, I came back here, became a teacher and the door opened, and now I’m here.”
She became the team’s first female coach last season.
Great and Small
TSD began playing sports with a baseball team in 1887.
Since then its teams have won 69 national championships in 12 sports, including 16 in football. And while those titles were meaningful, they weren’t statement-making the way a 2020 championship was. All it took was a pandemic and remarkable adaptability.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in spring 2020, it hit TSD hard. Some 40% of the 500 students live on campus—they come from all over the state—and many concerned parents kept their children home. Other players fell ill.
Football is a physical sport that requires numbers—11 players per team on the field at any one time. It began looking like the Rangers might not have the numbers to field a team, much less compete, as the pandemic tore through its roster.
Tomlinson is a third-generation player at TSD.
Scott Van Osdol
Ball carrier Daniel Sweet looks for an opening during a scrimmage.
Scott Van Osdol
TSD belongs to the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools, which also sponsors six-man football, with smaller teams that play on shortened fields. To keep playing, the Rangers downsized.
“To continue to have a football program, it was the best decision that we ever made,” says athletic director Chris Hamilton, a member of Pedernales Electric Cooperative. “However, we had to deal with some very upset community members and explain to people that we just couldn’t make it as a full team.
“So it took time. The community kind of went through a grieving process.”
And the team went through, well, a shrinking process. An 80-yard field was marked at their on-campus stadium, even as the goalposts remained in place for a 100-yard field. Illness and injury occasionally limited the 20-person roster to seven players.
But they won. And kept winning, through a 63-32 state championship victory over crosstown power Veritas Academy, which had routed them in a preseason scrimmage.
“Winning the state title as a Deaf school is way more challenging than winning the national title,” writes Kylar Sicoli, a senior wide receiver on that team, in an email. “A Deaf school will aways win the [Deaf] national title. We never won a football state title, so we made history.”
Jermiah Garcia played most of his life in the hearing world but didn’t feel he got the proper support, academically or socially. He transferred to TSD in 2022.
Scott Van Osdol
Theo Savannah with his father, Archie, who shared head coaching duties last season.
Scott Van Osdol
Sound of Success
Winning the state title was another step in dismissing preconceptions hearing people might have.
“They think that we have low IQs or we can’t drive. Things like that,” says quarterback Xiovan Tomlinson, a third-generation deaf player at TSD. “But really, deaf people can do anything.”
Montanez points out that he’s seen studies that deaf drivers are safer because they aren’t easily distracted and “have a lifetime’s learning on using their peripheral vision. It’s the same in football.”
AD Hamilton, who joined the school in 2001, says this is nothing new.
“Historically, Deaf teams have been oppressed just as deaf people have been oppressed, but hey, we’re here,” he says. “We’re doing this. We can do it. We’re just like you, and we’re better than you in some cases.”
Ursa Rewolinski grew up with strong connections to the TSD football team.
Scott Van Osdol
Jermiah Garcia played most of his life in the hearing world and was a budding standout as a freshman at Shoemaker High School in Killeen, but he didn’t feel he got the proper support, academically or socially. So, encouraged by his interpreter, a TSD alumnus, Garcia transferred to TSD for his sophomore season in 2022.
“I was really lost trying to communicate with my teammates. I couldn’t have my interpreter on the field,” Garcia says. “My interpreter would tell me, some of the students are saying that you can’t do this, you can’t do that, you can’t play.”
Teammate Niven Zhang is more succinct. “I just feel like going to a public school would be really a waste of time because there’s a lot of logistical things that we have to work out with interpreters,” he says. “Here at Texas School for the Deaf, everything works just like it should.”
Montanez knows his players are in the right place for success.
“Too often, when they’re being coached by someone who doesn’t understand them (tends to be hearing), things fly over their head,” he writes. “When coaches like me are able to communicate clearly, in depth and spatially, I can see the ‘aha’ moment in their eyes and faces.
“I love seeing that.”
Rewolinski became a teacher at the school in 2019 and last season became an assistant coach, the first woman to do so in the team’s history.
Scott Van Osdol
Help Ahead
One of the main challenges of a football player not being able to hear is, not surprisingly, communication.
Whistles. Audibles. Referee warnings. In-game coaching. Fans. Trash talk.
“Oh yeah, every opponent we go against has a lot of trash talk,” junior Theo Savannah says. “Then we show them we can play.”
Midway through the 2023 season, AT&T introduced a field-leveling technology, equipping helmets with 5G-augmented reality lenses that can display text.
NCAA rules, which many high school associations, including TAPPS, follow, prohibit electronic devices in helmets, but Gallaudet was granted a one-game waiver to use the technology. The Bison promptly ended a four-game losing streak.
Sicoli, one of several TSD alums playing for the Bison, writes that the technology could help them avoid late hit penalties caused by not being able to hear the ref’s whistle.
“That could be a game changer for some deaf players,” Sicoli writes. “Also the helmet would help the coach and players communicate during the game. The coach always has difficulty getting the player’s attention.”
David Goodnight, a referee from Somerville who is a member of Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative, doesn’t know ASL—few who officiate TSD games do—but officiating deaf teams’ games is an ongoing education.
“I just learned two words last week,” he says. He points just above his temple for “heads” and puts the palm of his right hand over the top of left hand and wags his left index finger for “tails.”
Goodnight says deaf players do a good job avoiding late hits. “Coaches say you play to the whistle,” he says. “Deaf players understand you play till the end of the play.”
