Some Virginia colleges now play a team that won’t hear the cheers: The players are deaf

Sereta Campbell performed a stellar rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” prior to Roanoke College’s Old Dominion Athletic Conference football game Sept. 27 at Salem Stadium.

You should have seen it.

The 63 players from visiting Gallaudet University who took the field surely did.

For many, looking at the video scoreboard above the stadium’s field house was the only way to absorb the words.

Almost every Bisons player is deaf or hard of hearing.

The Washington, D.C., school was founded in 1864 during the height of the Civil War courtesy of a federal charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln, who pledged to give deaf students “a fair chance in the race of life.”

Gallaudet is named for Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who traveled to Europe in the early 1800s to research methods of providing educational opportunities for the deaf community and returned to found the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut.

Gallaudet graduated its first class in 1869 and has fielded a varsity football team since 1883.

The school proudly declares to be the originator of the football huddle, dating to 1894 when quarterback Paul Hubbard noticed opponents from other deaf schools were intercepting his hand signals, so he formed his offense in a circle to prevent the thievery.

The football program has been discontinued on several occasions, most recently in 2003. Following its first undefeated season in 2005, Gallaudet moved up from the club level to NCAA Division III in 2007, reaching the playoffs in 2013 and 2022.

Gallaudet took another step in 2025 by leaving the dissolving East Coast Football Conference for the ODAC, which brought the Bison to Salem in September.

The school brought in a new head coach, Stefan LeFors, to coincide with the new era.

Lefors, 43, is a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, native who played quarterback at the University of Louisville, leading the Cardinals to a 12-1 record and a 44-40 victory over Boise State in the Liberty Bowl as a senior in 2004. He was the Conference USA Player of the Year and the Offensive Player of the Game in the 2005 East-West Shrine Game, later spending several seasons in the Canadian Football League.

Lefors served as a high school coach in North Carolina, Louisville and his hometown of Baton Rouge before becoming Gallaudet’s 37th head coach.

A child of deaf parents, he knew plenty about the school before arriving in the nation’s capital. His older brother, Eric, is a former Gallaudet football player. Several other relatives, including Lefors’ mother, Susan Carter Lefors, attended the school.

Roanoke College provided the visitors with a warm welcome to Salem until the game began. The Maroons, who are playing their first season of varsity football since 1942, scored a 38-14 victory in their ODAC debut.

The Bison actually beat Roanoke to the punch with their first ODAC triumph, a 39-30 win Sept. 20 on their home field against Averett.

Gallaudet, which lost 55-0 to Guilford at home last Saturday to fall to 1-3 in 2025, jaunts to Lexington on Saturday to face Washington and Lee. The Bison stay in the Shenandoah Valley for an Oct. 18 game at Bridgewater. The remainder of the team’s 2025 schedule has home games against Randolph-Macon (Oct. 25) and Hampden-Sydney (Nov. 1) and a season-ending trip to Shenandoah (Nov. 8).

Cardinal News caught up with Lefors this week during a break in preparation for the W&L game for some insight on the challenges and benefits of coaching football at Gallaudet.

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Cardinal: You have 63 players from 23 states and D.C. on your roster. Thirty players come from deaf schools, seven from Texas School for the Deaf and four from California School for the Deaf-Riverside (the most of any high school represented). The Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind ceased its football program after the 1987 season. How difficult is it to recruit football players to Gallaudet?

LeFors: Obviously, our pool of recruits is limited, clearly. So the first step, the no-brainer one, is the deaf schools across the country. But those numbers are dwindling. There may be 20 schools across the country playing football that are deaf schools, and of those 20, maybe 12 or 14 play eight-man football and the rest play six-man football.

From there, it is literally word-of-mouth. It is email blasts to high school coaches, ADs, principals, whoever across the country. There are so many deaf kids, hard-of-hearing kids out there that are mainstreamed into public schools, hearing schools.

Cardinal: How well-known is the school itself to mainstreamed high school students?

LeFors: You’d be shocked how many that come from hearing families, they don’t know about Gallaudet. They don’t know there’s opportunities there for them, so you’re just trying to spread the word as much as you can.

A high school coach might say, “Hey, I’ve got a kid on my team that has hearing loss, or has a cochlear implant or wears hearing aids.” You just try to touch base with those kids, regardless of how experienced they are. Even kids that don’t play football in high school.

That’s how you recruit them. You say, “Hey, you get to come to Washington, D.C. You leave out of here with an education and a degree.” For the kids that are mainstreamed and may not be fluent in sign language, you come here with the ability to speak and hear a little bit, you leave out of here bilingual and you have some opportunities to get a good job.

Cardinal: How does an incoming first-year student who does not know American Sign Language navigate his freshman year?

LeFors: There’s a four-week program before school starts. It’s a four-week cram session trying to learn a brand new language. That’s difficult. Some guys don’t make it. It’s tough for them for whatever reason. Then you get some kids that stick around for a year or two, but they just don’t get to that level in the classroom. They’ll get some assistance from interpreters in the beginning, but eventually they’ve got to figure it out.

Now you’ve got a football team, and you’ve got a barrier there that you’ve got to figure out in a hurry. It’s an interesting dynamic, and it’s one that coaches across the country would not understand. This kind of opportunity is kind of unique. Not everyone can do this job here. Being raised in the deaf community, it only seems right that I’m in a place like this.

Cardinal: As the child of deaf adults, what was your youth like, and how did it shape you?

Lefors: I don’t really know the right answer. It was normal to me. You see parents teaching their babies how to sign just to communicate if they want more milk, if they’re thirsty or hungry. It’s that idea, but it just kind of went to the next level as I was growing up.

My older brother could speak a little bit. That’s kind of where I learned to talk and do things. We were a close family. We did everything together. It was a great childhood. I really didn’t know any different until I got to elementary school, and you kind of look around and say, “OK, this is different.”

Cardinal: Starting quarterback JeVaughn Sargent does not have any degree of hearing loss. How is he able to qualify as a student and a member of the team?

Lefors: He’s like me. His parents are both deaf. The school will allow hearing kids, but they have to meet a certain level of sign language ability. For those hearing students that want to be interpreters or they want to get into deaf education, they can come, but they have to be very advanced in their signing ability.

We have three of those guys like me that come from deaf parents.

Cardinal: Football teams at deaf schools have used a large bass drum on the sidelines to give alerts to players on the field for years. How does Gallaudet utilize the drum before and during a game?

LeFors: There’s been times in the past where they [would] use it for the snap count. We don’t do that anymore. For pregame, just to get the stretch lines moving. But during the game, it’s critical for us to use because it’s our special teams alert. Typically, you have coaches walking up and down yelling, ‘Punt alert! Punt alert!’ We don’t have that luxury. Our guys are trained that when they hear or feel the drum, their eyes are up and alert, and they’re trying to find a coach.”

Cardinal: Since all but three of your players have total or partial hearing loss, how do they know when to stop play upon the official’s whistle to avoid a late-hit penalty?

LeFors: We may have got one that was after the play. It really hasn’t been an issue. Officials have really been good making their way into the pile, being big and demonstrative. Hopefully, guys see that. You get some after the play on the tackle, but nothing egregious.

Cardinal: Gallaudet’s football program was featured in a 2023 AT&T commercial for a revolutionary 5G helmet that can receive visual electronic signals in a small window in the quarterback’s facemask visor from an iPad on the sidelines. The helmet was used in several 2024 games, but you are not using it in 2025. Are you sending in plays via sign language?

Lefors: AT&T poured a lot of money into it, but AT&T is not in the helmet-making business. I’ll get emails from parents across the country: “What’s the process to get a helmet?” They are really, really expensive. We’re talking a hundred thousand dollars for a helmet.

Beyond that, there are so many things that could be worked out better. Your tablet that you’re using is pre-programmed into the helmet. If you’re trying to change it on a weekly basis for a game plan, that’s a big process. In game, if you had a play that had a bunch of different variations off of it, then it just takes forever to send it in to the quarterback and now he’s got to relay that information to the entire team.

 We’re signing the plays in. Everybody looks to the sideline. For us, it just works better for the entire team to look at us, and we’ll just tell you the play once.

Cardinal: How does the offense get the snap count?

LeFors: It’s a silent count. You picture when a team’s on the road and it’s a loud stadium. You go off the quarterback foot movement, or the guard will look back, and the quarterback will let him know when he’s ready. The guard will tap the center.

Audibles are kind of out the window. Once the linemen are down, you’re not getting their attention back. It’s [difficult for] the linemen communicating with each other, the last-minute adjustments on the blitz. Or defensively, just trying to make calls on motions. Those are the types of things where we are truly at a disadvantage, if you want to call it that.

If you didn’t know any different watching … from the stands … it’s still football. Maybe guys communicating a little bit more with their hands than normal, but other than that, it’s pretty much the same.

Cardinal: Your defensive coordinator, Stephon Healey, is in his 16th season on the coaching staff. Assistant Bob Miller is in his 18th season. Several of your assistants are former Gallaudet players. How much during your first season have you relied on their experience in such a unique environment?

Lefors: It’s so hit or miss. Obviously, they weren’t in the ODAC, so [now] that’s a huge challenge. Those [successful] teams, you just found those mainstream kids who wanted to play and they fit in here. Deaf schools, the flows of ups and downs, you never know from year to year. You just kind of ride the wave. It’s numbers game. We’re struggling with numbers. The goal is to get it up to 80, 90, 100 kids.

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Gallaudet’s campus abuts a high school for deaf and hard of hearing students (Model Secondary) and a pre-K and elementary for children from birth through the eighth grade (Kendall Demonstration Elementary School), bolstered under the presidential administrations of Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Richard Nixon.

If that sort of political juxtaposition seems unusual in 2025, so does a Gallaudet home football game.

While Roanoke College athletic director Curtis Campbell welcomed the Bisons and their supporters to Salem with an audiovisual message on the public address system — with his wife, Sereta, providing the signing — there was also a soloist at midfield for the national anthem providing the singing.

Not so at a Gallaudet home game, where the team’s dark jerseys have BISON spelled out in sign language.

“We don’t have a P.A.,” Lefors said. “It’s completely silent game day. It’s strange. The first game here for me, you’re used to bands playing. The national anthem is a flag waving on the board and the young ladies on the cheer team are just signing it. No music. Nothing.”

And in college football, nothing else is like it.