A less celebrated homecoming is happening this weekend at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park. But for U.S. Deaf Women’s National Team defender and Littleton native Mia White, it’s nothing short of a dream come true.
Before USWNT stars and fellow Coloradans Sophia Smith, Lindsey Horan and Mallory Swanson hit the DSGP pitch to face South Korea on Saturday afternoon, the Deaf WNT, 37-0-1 all-time, will host Australia in its first game since winning the 2023 DIFA World Deaf Football Championships last October.
What makes this different for White, who plays professionally for Finnish second-tier club Kotkan Työväen Palloilijat, is she will be playing at home in Colorado for the first time in a U.S. jersey.
In fact, it will be the first time the team has ever played a match on its home soil. Which also makes this the first time her family and close friends will be able to see her play in person for the U.S.
“It’s huge. I have never imagined in my wildest dreams that something like this would happen,” the Littleton native said through an ASL translator. “To have my hometown deaf community and all the support they’ve given me over the years being able to see and be a part of this history, knowing they were part of the reason I made it to where I am today based on where I grew up and what my experiences are, it means so much.”
Given the history being made by the match — among other things, it will be the first doubleheader including an extended national team and the senior USWNT and the first U.S. Soccer-controlled ENT match on live TV — White certainly feels some pressure.
But a sense of pride overwhelms the butterflies when she thinks about the sort of exposure the team will receive, not only for the current team, but for many former players who fought hard to keep it afloat since its foundation in 2005.
Up until 2022, when U.S. Soccer started fully funding the team, players had to do their own fundraising for equipment and travel. To this day, many hold down jobs and train on their own time, since a large portion of the team does not play professionally.
“To think about all of the work they did to form the team and the things they had to do to keep it going and now to have this match coming up, it really is history-making,” White said. “It feels normal, but it hasn’t ever happened before. It feels like this is finally getting that awareness out, creating visibility for the deaf team and showing that we exist. We’re here and we’re great athletes.
“I think that’s really cool.”
White’s journey with the Deaf WNT started — sort of — when her mom told her about it when she was 14. Around the same time, someone on the Deaf WNT scouted White and she learned a bit more.
But for reasons White said she still doesn’t know, she “kind of dismissed it.”
“I don’t think I realized the impact or the difference between playing on a hearing team and playing on a deaf team,” White said. “When I joined, I was 18 or 19 years old and when I got to my first training, I realized everybody is like me and everybody has a different range of what deafness means to them.”
To qualify for the team, a player must have at least 55 dB of hearing loss in their “better ear,” according to U.S. Soccer.
“I met all of those folks and realized how much respect, patience and open communication we had on this team, and it’s a completely different thing,” White said. “Before that, I had just played soccer; I wasn’t a part of the conversations about what we do, why we do it, all the formations and those kinds of things.”
Now, according to coach Amy Griffin, White embodies everything a player and deaf sports activist should, maximizing “every second” with the team. Though she plays professionally, not all of her teammates do. “You’re in charge of your own experience,” Griffin tells her players. And White, she says, is the epitome of that.
After people told White she couldn’t go pro following a college career at Division III Rochester Institute of Technology, after an NWSL tryout didn’t yield a roster spot, after visa issues and differences in expectations vs. reality at a semi-pro team in Spain created detours, she pressed on.
“She has had doors closed on her, but she has literally found this opportunity. It can be like finding a needle in a haystack,” Griffin said. “It just shows you how much she loves the game.”
White wants to get rid of the hay. She doesn’t want deaf players in any sport to have to jump through the same hoops she did to find a place to play professionally. In White’s past, the need to search in odd places for where to go, what to do and how to complete the fine-print items on the checklist to go pro is something she wants to eliminate.
Currently, she says, “there exist no resources” for deaf athletes looking to play after college, meaning a lot of athletes simply stop playing.
“My idea of closing that gap is to help people reach their peak and go play at the levels they want to,” White said. “I would like to create a place that is like a one-stop shop. The National Deaf Athlete Center has helped in the idea of co-founding something focused on nutrition, performance training, networking and basically everything that could be available for athletes. So if there’s another deaf person trying to find an opportunity, they’ll be able to go there and see what resources are available, what opportunities exist and be able to take full advantage of them.”
At the end of the day, White wants to close the gap. Playing a doubleheader with the USWNT on national TV fits into the plan pretty well, but she knows there’s still work to be done.
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