Blind sports fan changing lives on field
Weiler’s vision quest helps others play too
CUMMING, Ga. – Just behind home plate, elite teenage softball players from all over the country were lined up to watch one of their own try to play a sport that should have seemed familiar but was, of course, impossible.
One by one, they came to the plate and dug in. One by one, they swung and missed as the pitches that would have otherwise been routine went by them.
Standing somewhere beyond third base, Bryce Weiler was enjoying the spectacle, even though he couldn’t see any of it. Just like him, in this particular game on this particular night, the players trying to hit a softball were doing so without any vision.
Weiler, 28, has been blind since birth. It has taken a lot of opportunities away from him, including the chance to see the games he grew up loving mostly by the way they sounded.
But Weiler never accepted the notion that he couldn’t work in sports. Or that people with disabilities can’t play them.
Through the Beautiful Lives Project, which Weiler co-founded, he travels the country setting up events like this one where high-level athletes and people with disabilities are on the same playing field, learning from and inspiring one another.
“We’re giving them the opportunity to play with some of the best athletes in the country and show them there’s people out there in the world who want to help them overcome the obstacles and challenges in their life,” Weiler said. “Hopefully people’s lives will be changed as much through this as much as mine was.”
2013 PHOTO BY MATT DETRICH/ THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR
Changing attitudes
On this particular night in July, Weiler had taken the Amtrak by himself from Connecticut to Atlanta so that he could host an event before the Triple Crown USA National fastpitch softball tournament where hundreds of elite high school and middle school players had gathered.
Across three fields, local organizations brought groups of adults with various disabilities to hit and run and field against the tournament participants. The cheering and the laughing was echoing through the park, but on Weiler’s field, it’s quiet. In fact, silence is essential because this is a game guided by sound.
Weiler set up a demonstration of Beep Baseball, a form of softball that has been modified for people who are visually impaired, with a team from nearby Athens led by Roger Keeney, 74, who got involved with the sport as a college student in the 1970s before he was blinded years later in a farming accident.
“I always say God has a sense of humor,” Keeney said.
Keeney’s team, which has six blind players and annually travels to the Beep Baseball World Series, is full of inspiring stories. There’s Jamie, who suffered a stroke as an infant and whose involvement with the sport gave her the confidence to get a job and live on her own. There’s Cody, who grew up playing sports but lost nearly all of his vision at age 16 from a rare virus and found this as his athletic outlet at 23. Then there’s Justin, a bodybuilder who went blind in college due to a genetic disease and now travels three hours from his home outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, every
week to practice with the team.
“The model of our entire agency is making the impossible possible through adapted sports,” said Keeney, who got his Ph.D. in adapted physical education at Georgia and now runs the Athens Inclusive Recreation and Sports nonprofit.
“As professors we can talk for an entire semester to a class of 60 students and might get three that even begin to listen about attitude change. But as soon as the course is over, they’ve forgotten a few days later. It doesn’t stick. But you know something? Put on a blindfold, get on the field and play ball for 10 minutes with us, and your attitude is permanently changed.”
As the demonstration began, Keeney’s team was spread across the perimeter of the outfield. They all wore blindfolds to ensure players with some vision didn’t have an advantage. The key to the game is a softball that beeps, so that the fielders can track it by sound when it’s hit.
The two bases are 5-foot foam poles that emit a buzzing sound so that the runner knows where to go. Essentially, if a ball is picked up by one of the fielders before the hitter gets to a base, it’s an out. If not, it’s a run.
Hitters, who are also blindfolded, stand in the batter’s box and take pitches from a sighted teammate rather than an opponent. In other words, instead of trying to strike someone out, the whole point of the game is developing choreography, timing and communication to know where and when the pitch is thrown.
The problem, at least for people with sight, is that getting a hit is nearly impossible. Among the dozens of players who tried, only a handful even made minimum contact.
“It’s harder than I expected,” said 15year old Allyiah Swiney, who was there with a team from Durham, North Carolina. “It makes me realize how blessed I am to be able to play a sport like this. It’s even hard to run. I felt like I was going to trip up my own feet.”
For Weiler, bringing young people like Swiney face-to-face with some of the obstacles disabled people face is the essence of what he’s trying to do with the Beautiful Lives Project, which would be impressive enough if it was his only accomplishment in sports.
‘He’s got a lot of courage’
Weiler’s relentlessness in sending unsolicited emails to pro sports teams and college programs has also landed him friendships across the college basketball coaching community, a disability consultant job for the Baltimore Orioles and a gig as a radio announcer for the Atlantic League’s New Britain Bees.
That’s right, even though Weiler can’t see what’s happening on the field he now counts more than 140 broadcasts of various sports on his résumé.
“About two months after I had acquired the team, I got an email from Bryce and the first sentence was basically, ‘My name is Bryce Weiler and I’m a blind 26-year-old man who color commentates baseball games,’ ” Bees owner Anthony Iacovone said. “It kind of captivated me to read that sentence.”
Weiler does it by learning everything he can about the players, whether it’s reading on the internet through a computer program that talks to him and essentially getting to know every player and manager in the Atlantic League. Weiler can’t exactly call the action on the field, but he can talk about strategies, tendencies and personalities to thread the narrative of what the playby-play announcer is describing.
“It’s kind of baffling in a good way,” said Iacovone, who ultimately combined his charitable foundation with Weiler’s to launch the Beautiful Lives Project. “I’ve never seen anything like a person who can just feel the game and listen and cue off of someone else in the booth. He’s amazing at it.
“What Bryce has done in his life is absolutely amazing and he’s made no excuses whatsoever for himself. His persistence and passion is no different than an entrepreneur who starts a business and becomes successful because he’s gotten a lot of ‘nos,’ and the fact he continues to do that and gets people to open up their doors makes him who he is.”
For Weiler, though, it’s not the negative responses that formed his passion to work in sports but rather the experiences that let him get a foot in the door. In college at Evansville, Weiler would often need the help of fellow students to do basic things like go get his tray at the cafeteria. But when it came to basketball, he essentially knocked on the door of then-coach Marty Simmons and talked his way into sitting on the bench during home games, helping on some radio broadcasts and even singing the national anthem. Weiler often says being allowed to do that changed his life.
“He’s got a lot of courage. He’s just not afraid,” said Simmons, who is currently an assistant at Clemson. “He’s really smart, and just super passionate about basketball and life in general.
“He’d come and knock on the door and he’d say, ‘Coach, you’re going to have to kick me out of the office or I’m going to talk to you all day.’ But I’m telling you we got more from him than we could ever give back. He has the most incredible attitude of any person I’ve been around.”
To see him put that attitude into action, though, is something else entirely because even with his limitations, he’s willing to go just about anywhere at any time to tell his story and bring sports to those who typically don’t get the chance to play. And if those young softball players who played with the blind team grow up with a better understanding of disabled people and more openness to help them, Weiler will have accomplished more through sports in one night than most people do in a lifetime.
“When you have special needs or challenges, you are used to someone telling you that (you) can’t do something,” Weiler said. “People didn’t really think I could work in sports because I can’t see and there’s been a lot of jobs I can’t do. But I think I’ve been able to find ways I can use what I’ve learned in life. It really changed my life being around coaches and players, and I wanted to give that back to other people.”