Coach of U.S. Women's Deaf National Team still growing sport 30 years after starting UNM soccer program

Amy Griffin has been down this road before.

It’s not a smooth journey, by any means.

But, for some reason, she’s fond of it. And she’s proven to be darn good at navigating the bumps, potholes and detours this road presents.

As Griffin — the former goalkeeper of the United States Women’s National Team, including a starter on the 1991 World Cup winning team — stood on the sideline of the UNM Soccer Complex on a blustery Friday night coaching the U.S. Women’s Deaf National Team in an exhibition against the UNM Lobos, feelings of déjàvu hit on multiple levels.

Griffin — née Allmann — was 26 years old when UNM women’s athletics trailblazer Linda Estes hired her in 1992 to start the school’s first fully funded varsity women’s soccer program. For the coach, it was a passion project — trying to grow the sport while fighting for acceptance.

Since 2015, Griffin has been coaching the U.S. Women’s Deaf National Team — with assistant coach, fellow former National Team star and her close “buddy,” Joy Fawcett — spreading the word to young boys and girls who might be deaf or hard of hearing that there is a place for them in the sport.

“I think that’s why Joy and I love coaching this team,” said Griffin, whose roster includes many players still in high school. “We feel like it’s just like it was back in the 90s — kind of our comfort zone is growing the game and creating awareness, being used to not having everything handed to us.

“There’s value in that, right? When you get on the gold medal podium, you’re like, ‘We worked hard for this. We worked hard to even get new players on our team, because nobody knows about the team.’ I think there’s fun in hard, for sure.”

The Deaf National Team has been on plenty of podiums. They are 37-0-1 in international play all-time and won the 2023 4th World Deaf Football Championship in Malaysia.

Griffin says she feels “blessed” to coach a squad that playfully refers to itself as “The best team nobody has ever heard of.”

For the past week, some of the team has been in Albuquerque, including 15 players — eight of them first-timers while team veterans took time off. The Lobos beat them 7-0 on Friday. Griffin knew the match would be a tough, but jumped at the opportunity to house a camp at her old stomping grounds when it was suggested by UNM women’s soccer head coach Heather Dyche, another friend in the sport and a fellow US National Team coaching acquaintance.

“She and I just established a great kind of friendship over the years through teaching courses in US Soccer and kind of helping with these national teams,” said Dyche, who is starting her 10th year coaching the Lobos. “I told her she should come do (a camp here), and she was like, ‘Oh my god, you’re right. I forgot how nice these fields are and these facilities are great.’”

The teams will put on a clinic from 9 to 10:30 a.m. Saturday morning at UNM — open to all kids and registration is $25. The hope is there might be a few kids who are hard of hearing or deaf — both just to have fun and learn, but also because these clinics are essentially the only feeder system the Deaf National Team has to recruit players.

To qualify for the deaf team, a player must have 55 decibel hearing or worse in their “better” ear.

“It’s the one thing they (her players) absolutely love to do because they were that deaf or hard of hearing kid once that didn’t have a camp,” Griffin said.

UNM women’s soccer team took the field together for the first time this season on Friday. They played the match with plugs in their ear, trying to match in some way their Deaf National Team counterparts.

“Amy said, ‘You know, it’d be kind of cool if your players would be willing to wear ear plugs,’” Dyche said before the match.”And of course, my girls thought that was really cool. So we will be wearing earplugs, which I don’t think will be near as significant of a hearing loss as some of her players. But it’s kind of cool, because if you think about most sports, the communication becomes so dependent on verbal communication and talking. We’ll have to try to expand use of all our senses.”

Griffin led the Lobos to a 27-24-4 record from 1993 through 1995. Two of her three years produced winning seasons as a Division I Independent (the program joined the WAC in 1996 and Mountain West in the league’s inaugural 1999-2000 academic year.)

There were wins against teams such as TCU, USC, Arizona, Washington State, Texas Tech and BYU, more than one being nationally ranked at the time.

“I would go to the grocery store wearing my UNM soccer sweatshirt, and everyone was, hey, congratulations on the match, or I was there. Everyone knew what we were doing, and they validated sort of women’s athletics at a university where at the other place I was, which was at San Diego State at the time, they couldn’t have cared less,” Griffin said. “So that was fun. It was really fun to start a program. And I think I’m just realizing that now that not everyone gets to do that, and seeing where the program is now is really, really heartwarming. But it was work.”

Griffin, who is not deaf nor does she know American Sign Language well enough to speak it, said her team has to rely on a variety of cues while on the field. She said she feels blessed that the players have welcomed her into their world.

“How do I get to be so lucky to travel the world, work with Joy who is one of my best buddies, and be invited into a deaf community that soccer is the only reason I would have ever been invited into this culture and have kind of a new lens at looking at life,” Griffin said. “It’s given me a realization of what it’s like to not have equal access, so therefore I can fight a little bit harder for it in other avenues.”

UNM women's soccer team hosts friendly against US Women’s Deaf National Team