Brieann Baldock, goalie for the Canadian Paralympic goalball team, is beyond excited to compete in Tokyo later this month.
Goalball is a three-member team sport designed specifically for athletes with vision disabilities. Participants try to throw a ball that has bells embedded in it into the opponents’ goal. The ball is thrown by hand, never kicked. A bit larger than a basketball, the ball weighs about 1.25 kilograms.
Competitors wear opaque eyeshades to ensure they can’t see anything despite all of them having varying degrees of vision disabilities.
As the goalie, Baldock, from Edmonton, Alberta, has to listen for the jingling of the ball and then dive to stop it from entering her goal-post.
The key to the game is to move the ball with such speed and skill as to “trick the other team into not hearing where the ball is,” Baldock explained to CBC’s Edmonton AM.
“It was very surreal and it was extremely exciting,” Baldock said of being selected for the Canadian team.
When she told her family after making the trials in May, she said they “burst out” in excitement. “It was crazy. It was a really cool moment,” she said.
According to her Team Canada profile, Baldock was born with oculocutaneous albinism, a rare inherited condition that causes a reduction in pigmentation in the skin, hair and eyes, and is known to create vision issues.
The condition has left Baldock legally blind since birth.
Baldock first discovered goalball when she was young but, according to her parents, she didn’t enjoy it. At age 16, she was encouraged to try it again at an Alberta Sports and Recreation Association for the Blind event.
She said she was the only kid at the event and was “kind of scared because it was this ball coming at me relatively fast.” But this time she loved it.
“It was really crazy to have that experience of liking it again and really just falling in love with the idea that I could get to an elite level,” she said.
The pandemic made training difficult as court times weren’t readily available.
Her parents let her use their garage as her personal gym — “Shout out to them for letting me do that,” she said — and she recruited family and friends to train with her.
Baldock’s first match takes place on August 25 when Canada plays against the Russian Paralympic Committee.
