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INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — It is America's Friday night ritual stripped of so much of its soundtrack: Muted are the cheerleader's cheers, the crowd's exclaims, the coach's commands. There is no band thumping out the school fight song. No public address announcer bellowing "First down!" No quarterback shouting at the line of scrimmage.
But there is football, pure and passionate and powerful high school football. And these boys want you to know the game means as much to them as it does to any boy on any field in any corner of the state.
The opening scene is familiar: A collection of teenagers bobbing their heads to music in the waning hours before kickoff while they tape their ankles and lace their cleats, pimples dotting their eager faces in a locker room that smells of the sweat and sacrifice they endured beneath the unforgiving August sun.
Then, the evening's first wrinkle: Their head coach enters and delivers his pregame speech without uttering a word.
The disparities continue as the night wears on. His players can't hear the referee's whistle, or his instructions, or, for that matter, much of anything. Most striking is how they hardly let those hurdles hinder them at all.
Being deaf complicates things. But it doesn't keep these boys off the football field.
Because this field, and these Friday nights, are their avenue to normalcy. It's where 26 players on the Indiana School for the Deaf's football squad find refuge and regularity. It's where they get their chance to say 'We're just like you,' then go out and prove it.
They did so in their season opener. Watch their quarterback connect with their star receiver for a 53-yard touchdown on the season's first snap. Watch them pile up 46 points midway through the third quarter. Watch them celebrate in the locker room afterward, smiles stretching across each of their sweaty faces.
Handicap? What handicap? These boys make do just fine, thank you very much.
Garrett Wooten inherited a mess in 2011.
"The team had lost control," he tells The Indianapolis Star (http://indy.st/1wNhSkE ) through a translator. "No morale whatsoever."
It was a broken program stuck in the slog of a three-year winless streak. Players saw five different head coaches come through in five years, and the worst of it came on a bus trip in 2010, when a hazing incident cost two coaches their jobs and resulted in multiple players being suspended.
Though he was a first-time head coach, Wooten would have none of it. A former star player at the school and a later a college safety at Gallaudet University, a deaf school, he brought with him a rigid discipline the program craved. He forgot about wins and losses and looked long term, instead focusing on player development, accountability and cleaning a culture that had quickly soured.
It was humbling for a program that boasts five deaf prep national titles, the last coming in 2007. Soon after they staggered to rock bottom: Players were booted off the team for academics and acting out. After six were kicked off for failing midterm grades late in the 2011 season, Wooten took a roster of 13 players total into their sectional opener.
They lost by 47 points. They finished the year 0-10.
The worst of it looked like this: 34 straight losses. Three seasons without a win. As Dante Paulone, a wide receiver and cornerback, puts it: "Players had just lost all motivation."
But through it all, slowly, surely, Wooten saw slivers of progress. He instituted the team's first-ever summer program — weight room sessions and seven-on-seven drills — and the players began showing up, two or three at first, then five, then ten.
Then, in Wooten's second season, the team won its first game in almost four years. They finished that season 1-9, but the kids were buying in. It was building.
Andy Alka kept shouting at his players from the sideline, same as he'd always done, before it finally hit him. He could shout all he wanted. It did him no good.
"A huge eye-opener," he calls his first Friday night as the team's defensive coordinator. "Because that's when I truly realize you can't change things. I can't change things at the last second. If the offense changes things at the line of scrimmage, I'm stuck. I can't audible. I can't yell and get their attention. I can't send in a code word."
It was new world for him. Alka, who is not deaf but knows American Sign Language, spent 16 years as a teacher, administrator and coach in the Hamilton Southeastern school district before landing on the ISD's campus as its elementary principal. Soon enough, they asked if he wanted to help out with the football team. He was in.
Then he learned what he'd gotten himself into.
Greeting Alka at his first practice was a varsity team of 20 players — total. At HSE, he coached an eighth-grade team of 77. With an enrollment of just over 100 students at the high school, ISD is one of the smallest IHSAA members. Fielding a competitive team runs secondary, sometimes, to fielding a team at all.
There were more challenges ahead. Alka learned to adapt, and began to fight that ingrained impulse — every football coach's impulse, really — to scream from the sidelines. Instead he signed. He told his players to look his way before every snap, and he'd signal their formation. It was his only option.
He learned that deaf players communicate on the football field the same way they communicate off it. By signing, they're able to relay formations and play calls and line shifts without the other team hearing a word. Some of the deaf school's players call it their greatest advantage.
"Of course it helps us," says Lance Wood, a sophomore tight end/defensive end. "If we're signing, opponents don't know what we're doing. If I'm on defense and I'm looking out and (ordering) out a blitz, our team starts moving over and communicating with each other and the offense is confused."
There are, of course, drawbacks. Everything must be signed. Alka's game-night duties are part-defensive coordinator, part-translator between Wooten, their players and the referees. Oh, and one more thing: Late hits.
"They're not intentional," Alka tells the referees. "The kids can't hear the whistle."
He asks the officials to wave their hands at the close of every play so the players can see the stoppage in action. There are other clear differences: The national anthem before the game is signed, not sung, and the stadium is strikingly quieter than your average Friday night football game — there is no school band, no cheerleaders, no P.A. announcer. Touchdowns celebrations are noticeably more hushed. So are halftime speeches.
But like any locker room, the players still blast music before kickoff — "They can feel the beat," Alka says. They watch Wooten sign his instructions before the game then break into applause, eager to take the field.
"There's really no difference between here and another school up the road," says Chris Curless, the team's athletic trainer. "(Football) is just another way for them to show how competitive they are."
Alka, now in his fourth year coaching at ISD, has grown to savor the experience.
"Being here has really engulfed me," he says. "I tell my friends at Heritage Christian and Columbus East, 'Coaching hearing kids is easy.' (This) is one of the most challenging things I've ever done, but God, is it rewarding."
Last season came the breakthrough. ISD won its first four games and finished 5-5, the team's best record in six years.
"It lifted the boys up," Wooten says. "It showed them they could do more than compete, they could win."
Now, they aim higher. They made their point clear as day against Traders Point.
The deaf Hoosiers entered their 2014 season opener with just 18 players available — several have yet to complete the IHSAA-mandated 10 practices, while a few remain injured — and yet, thin as they were, ISD raced to a 46-0 cushion by the third quarter. Lightning caused the game to be called early, but it did little to dampen the delight in the home team's locker room afterward.
"46-0?" Wooten signed with a smile. "Not a bad start."
"What I'm most impressed with was how disciplined they were," said Allan Gray, the lead referee who worked Friday's game. "I can't imagine what they must do to communicate during practices and keep everyone on the same page. Those guys were together tonight.
"Frankly, they're just like any good football team out there."
The Deaf Hoosiers are together moving forward, a once-broken program built back up by Wooten and his staff and the group of boys who bought in.
"We're deaf, but we're also responsible to educate the general public," says the school's athletic director and Lance's father, Paul Wood. "How that's done is by playing sports. There's a great desire to say, 'Yes, I'm deaf. But I can do it.' And there are some teams out there who just hate losing to the deaf school."
Their work remains unfinished, but sizable strides have come. The players are proud of the program they helped resurrect.
"I'm a very happy senior now," says Cody Crace, the lanky receiver who hauled in the team's first touchdown Friday night. "I'm not ready to graduate."
They have grown to love Friday nights, love playing under the lights, love competing and winning and proving they're just like any other team on any field in any corner of the state.
"One word: Football," says Lance Wood. "It makes us feel equal."
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Information from: The Indianapolis Star, http://www.indystar.com
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