TRT News

Bipin Bihari Chowdhury School for the Deaf – Bhubaneswar, India

on Nov 21 in Events, India, Media, News, Tour tagged by Martin TRT

by TRT Media – photos by Nina Rangoy

With the 2011 TRT Tour to India complete the volunteers have returned to their home countries and resumed their normal lives of working and studying … but its a great time to reflect on one specific landmark achievements from the 2011 Tour.

Over the last two years the Tag Rugby Trust has adapted its coaching programme and learnt an incredible amount about running a sports programme with deaf children. What we have actually learnt is that other than a few refereeing refinements, very little needs to be changed and coaches need just to learn a small amount of sign language in order to open up a whole new area of development through sports … and it applies to all the locations we visit. The key thing we have learnt is just to be confident in the ability of the children … communication is an obvious difference, but that aside the levels of ability among the students is as high as anywhere else we teach.

So, full of confidence 7 coaches from the party were able to attend the first morning at the Bipin Bihari Chowdhury (BBC) deaf school. We were quite ambitious with our plans – all 97 of the children would have an introduction to Tag Rugby. We would then gradually whittle the numbers down so we could focus on preparing a team of Grade 5 girls for the Tournament on Wednesday.

In preparation, we had invited two of the older boys to come and watch the Tournament at KISS the previous Friday, and they set about the task as Coaching Assistants with so much energy, it was great to see.

Eventually we had 5 pitches marked out and the classes split roughly to have similar ages / sizes all working together. In no time at all the children were tagging eachother, playing phase one of Tag Rugby, which some call Chaos Rugby where there are no rules beyond where to score and pass if you are tagged. What was brilliant to see was the number of huge smiles on everyones faces.

Our time at B.B.C. was amazing. Each time we arrived for a session we were greeted with enthusiasm, they loved giving us our new ‘sign names’ and we remembered a lot of theirs in return. Gez Mandell even got to practice some of his English sign language he had recently learnt through a programme at work … and whilst there were differences, the kids were really intent on seeing how he formed letters and words, quickly showing him the ‘right’ way !

By the end of the fourth session, we had a group of 14 girls that were starting to play something close to Tag Rugby. Tags on the floor and offside were still to be mastered, but we were confident that they would be able to participate fully in the Tournament on Wed afternoon.

When Tournament day came we packed two Auto Rickshaws with the final selection of 10 girls … and squeezed in a few supporters for good measure. Initially the group were quite awestruck by their presence in SAI International school and all the other teams readying for the Tournament, but it was easy to get make them feel comfortable by giving them a ball and letting them get on with some final practice passing among themselves.

And what a start … we had set ourselves some goals that scoring a try in our first game would be something to celebrate … we certainly didn’t see what was about to happen ! Our team ran their hearts out and won their first two games … it didn’t take long for the rest of the people at the tournament to recognise sign language for celebrations … everyone was shaking their hands with their thumb and little finger sticking out !

The girls became firm favorites with everyone at SAI that day, and whilst they didn’t win the Tournament, they certainly captured the hearts of the crowd and most definitely sent several hundred people home talking all about the girls from the deaf school playing rugby and how they had learnt two specific signs … one being the deaf equivalent of clapping and the second being the sign for “I’m happy”.