Could Goalball Be The Breakout Sport Of The Paris Paralympics? U.S. Captain Calahan Young Is Working On It

Fifty miles north of Pittsburgh, the student body at Slippery Rock University just might be onto something.

About a decade ago, when Calahan Young was an undergrad there, his buddies wanted to know where he kept disappearing to. When they discovered that their friend was one of the country’s most promising young goalball players, they came back with two questions.

First: What the heck is goalball?

Second: How do we get in on the action?

“We started a collegiate team,” said Young, now 29. “So I was able to have my friends come play the sport that I travel all the time for.”

Young has long since moved on from Slippery Rock, but the sport continues to have a presence on the campus of around 8,000 students. And if Young and Team USA have anything to say about it, their sport might just be primed for a bigger breakout at the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games.

Similar to curling, the Scottish stones-sliding-on-ice game that became a cult favorite in the years after its 1998 return to the Olympic Winter Games, goalball is an obscure yet simple and eminently watchable sport.

In it, two teams of three athletes line up on opposite sides of a court, then take turns flinging a heavy ball across and trying to score on a giant goal that spans the other side. The catch is that all the athletes are visually impaired, so they play in total silence in order to hear the bouncing and skidding of the 3-pound ball, as well as the bells ringing inside it. To make sure everyone is on an even playing field, all the athletes wear blackout shades — an adaptation that can be applied for sighted players such as Young’s college friends in unofficial games.

Paralympic goalball isn’t exactly new, having originated as a form of rehab for World War II veterans. It’s been a full medal sport at the Paralympic Games since 1976, and both the U.S. men and women have won gold medals.

But with interest in the Paralympics rapidly growing — Paris organizers are expecting record ticket sales, while NBC is planning historic TV and streaming coverage in the U.S. — what better time than now to make goalball the summer sensation?

In some ways, the momentum has already begun.

Expanded TV coverage at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games, when the U.S. men finished fourth and the women won silver, brought a boost in exposure. Young was even recognized at the mall when he got home.

“Someone came up to me and they’re like, ‘Oh I saw you on TV. You’re Calahan Young. You play goalball,’” he said, still sounding surprised.

So what if that’s only happened once, ever. There are other signs, too. Earlier this year, members of the Yak, a popular podcast from Barstool Sports, declared goalball “the sport of the future” and shared a video of themselves trying it out, blindfolded and all. A new school library book about the sport released in January, too.

So with a solid time zone this summer, unprecedented live streaming and maybe a viral moment or two, why can’t goalball be this summer’s curling?

“I always say it’s a cool sport you’ve never heard of,” Young said. “And once you get people to see it, they love it. It is a high-octane sport, especially at the top level.”

For Young, goalball has already been a revelation. Growing up in Irwin, a southeast suburb of Pittsburgh, he always wanted to play team sports, but a genetic retina condition called retinitis pigmentosa, or “RP,” complicated that. Though he tried baseball, basketball and football as a kid, his declining vision made that increasingly difficult.

“I had a lot more usable vision, but I still had no peripheral,” he said of his career trying to stop punt returns on the gridiron. “So I’m getting destroyed on every play.”

Around that time, he learned of goalball through a program for visually impaired students.

“And once I found it I was like, this is incredible,” he said. “Like, I have a team sport where it’s an equal playing field, where I can excel as the athlete that I am.”

Young leaned into the game during his early teenage years, which led to a pair of youth national titles and eventually national team camps. In 2018, a year after graduating from Slippery Rock with a degree in recreational therapy, the U.S. team called on Young to compete at the world championships in Sweden, where the Americans finished fifth.

Over the years Young added a master’s degree and now works full-time in a consulting job while training year-round at the Turnstone Center for Children & Adults with Disabilities, the U.S. goalball team’s official training base in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

On the court, Young is the team’s captain, an imposing 6-foot-7 figure who uses his massive wingspan to whip shots from difficult angles and smother any coming his way from the other side.

The sport has taken him around the world and brought him unforgettable moments, such as when he scored four unanswered goals, including the overtime winner, in a 2021 Paralympic quarterfinal win over Ukraine.

Following back surgery that kept him out of the 2022 world championships, Young is feeling strong again and has gold-medal aspirations in Paris.

“I really do believe that we are the best team in the world,” he said. “We can beat anyone.”

The Americans aren’t likely to be the favorites, though. Brazil and China have emerged as the men’s powers, with Lithuania not far behind. The U.S. men last medaled in 2016, and their lone gold medal came in 1984. Meanwhile, with each subsequent Paralympics, more and more countries are investing in Para sports.

All of which only makes it more and more essential for the United States to keep pushing, too.

The biggest challenge, Young said, is that the sport lacks an established pipeline in this country. He wants every eye doctor, and every school and organization that works with the blind, to know about goalball so they can help young visually impaired people find it and excel, just like he did.

Young works toward that goal with the sport’s national governing body, the U.S. Association of Blind Athletes, and some extra publicity from Paris this summer will only help. Meanwhile, up on the campus at Slippery Rock, the sport is still thriving. All it took for a group of sighted students to fall for the game was a little exposure — and some blindfolds.

“It’s an equal playing field, no matter how you do it,” Young said. “And so that’s the thing that is really unique about it is that once people see that they’re like, ‘Oh, we can go play goalball.’”