These Utah soccer players — including a young mom — hope to win the U.S.’s fifth gold medal at the Deaflympics

Taegan Frandsen Ferrin, Sophie Post and Payton DeGraw have had separate journeys that led them to the U.S. women’s deaf national team.

Taegan Frandsen Ferrin excuses herself. Roughly 30 seconds later, she returns to the Zoom interview and places her 7-month-old daughter Nora in her lap.

A couple days later, Ferrin, of Centerville, Utah, and baby Nora would be in Tokyo.

“Not many 7-month-olds have a passport, but this one does,” Ferrin said.

There, Ferrin will suit up with fellow Utahns Sophie Post and Payton DeGraw for the U.S. deaf women’s national soccer team at the 2025 Deaflympics. The U.S. plays its first game of the tournament on Friday against host country Japan.

Ferrin, Post and DeGraw are tasked with helping the U.S. secure its record fifth gold medal and defending the team’s unbeaten streak. The team has won 40 games and tied just once since its inception in 2005 — and that tie ended with a win in a penalty shootout.

“Of course, I feel really honored and privileged to be chosen to go for the Deaflympics to represent my country. I feel like it’s really cool to be involved with the Deaflympics as well, and I just feel really excited to be involved with this kind of experience,” DeGraw told the Deseret News through ASL interpreter Emily Thiel.

Payton DeGraw

This will be the first Deaflympics for DeGraw, who grew up in Utah and played soccer at Brighton High School.

“My parents were very involved while interpreting for me, so I felt like it was really normal playing as a deaf person,” she said. “My coach would explain what to do, and they would use gestures and point where I should go and what I should do on the field. But really, my coaches were really supportive, too, and encouraged me plenty.”

DeGraw started her playing career as a forward but transitioned to goalkeeper to have a more challenging position.

She said the position change “was really beneficial for me as a deaf person, being able to scan the field and see everything. I could see what was going on. I could read the game.”

In 2018, DeGraw sat in the Las Vegas airport after a soccer tournament with her mom. There, she met Post and her mother. Post’s mom told DeGraw’s mom about the U.S. deaf women’s national soccer team.

DeGraw, who was born deaf, had never played with deaf players before.

“My mom signed me up because she was very interested in joining a deaf team for me and having that experience,” she said.

She attended her first national team camp later that year in Michigan.

That camp would lead to opportunities like the upcoming Deaflympics as well as helping the U.S. win its third Women’s World Deaf Championship in Malaysia in 2023.

After graduating from Brighton in 2018, DeGraw went to Gallaudet University, where she earned a degree in international studies and continued her soccer career. Upon finishing her degree, she worked as an aide at Jean Massieu School of the Deaf in Salt Lake City.

Now, DeGraw is working on getting her master’s from the University of Utah.

Taegan Frandsen Ferrin

Taegan Frandsen of Centerville, Utah, is a goalkeeper for the U.S. deaf women’s national soccer team. | Joy Marshall, U.S. Soccer

Ferrin was born with an enlarged vestibular aqueduct, which causes the fluid in her ear to fluctuate and results in hearing loss, she previously explained to the Deseret News.

Ferrin has worn hearing aids since she was 3 months old. While playing soccer hasn’t been easy, the former Viewmont High goalkeeper has gone on to represent her country at the 2022 Deaflympics and the 2023 World Deaf Football Championships.

While this won’t be Ferrin’s first Deaflympics, it will be her first as a mom.

Nora will accompany Ferrin to Tokyo. For the first two weeks, Ferrin’s mother will be there to care for baby Nora before Ferrin’s husband comes and takes care of their daughter for the remainder of the tournament.

Nora has already attended two national team camps with her mother in New Mexico and North Carolina.

“All the girls enjoy having her there, and it was so fun to watch them kind of interact with her,” she said.

Ferrin feels like her soccer career helped prepare her for motherhood.

“As a goalkeeper, you can’t really expect what’s going to happen. Like everything is unexpected. So, you kind of have to roll with the punches, and as a mom, you can’t expect everything. Everything is kind of just thrown at you,” she said.

Ferrin is grateful that her daughter can come with her and she doesn’t have to miss her while she’s away at camp.

”It’s been so nice to not have to be worried about missing her throughout the week. But just like knowing she’s there, knowing I can go see her when I want to and stuff — it’s been awesome,” she said.

She has assistant coach Joy Fawcett to thank for Nora being able to tag along.

“Joy is the reason why I get to bring Nora to all my camps and all the tournaments because she was the first national team player that had kids,” she said. “So she got to bring her kids along to her camps and her tournaments. And she fought for that, for herself, and she has fought that for extended national team players as well, specifically for the deaf team.”

According to Ferrin, Fawcett believes “no mom should have to be away from their kids,” and that “it’s not fair for you as a mom to have to quit what you love doing just because you’re having kids.”

Fawcett, a two-time World Cup Champion and Olympic gold medalist, also helped motivate Ferrin in her return to the pitch after her pregnancy. Ferrin would receive texts from Fawcett telling her that she was going to do stairs and asking if Ferrin was going to too.

“I was like, ‘Oh, well, if freaking Joy’s doing stairs, I gotta go do stairs, too.’ So, she was the main reason why I came back after having Nora and why I came back so quickly, too. So, Joy is the reason why I’m here today,” Ferrin said.

Sophie Post

Post, of Murray, Utah, was born with reverse slope hearing, but she hasn’t let it and the lack of accommodations for her disability stop her soccer career.

“I actually had a coach tell me one time that I wouldn’t be able to play on the next level of the team unless I could like figure out how to hear people, essentially,” she previously told the Deseret News.

Post joined the national team in 2017, and is the longest-tenured of the three Utahns on the squad.

With the deaf national team, Post won both the 2022 Deaflympics and the 2023 World Deaf Football Championships. She also starred in last year’s historic doubleheader with the senior women’s national team.

That game was the first-ever doubleheader featuring an extended national team and senior national team, the deaf national team’s first-ever game on U.S. soil and its first televised U.S. Soccer-controlled match, as the Deseret News previously reported.

Post capped that historic year off with a nomination for the U.S. Soccer 2024 Female Deaf Player of the Year.

Post is grateful for the opportunity to compete in another Deaflympics.

“I’m almost like more excited than the first time because I kind of know what I’m getting myself into this time, but I’m just really grateful to be able to make the roster and be back on the team and get to enjoy the coaches for their last camp,” she told the Deseret News last week.

The tournament will mark the last one for head coach Amy Griffin and Fawcett.

“I feel like they both have contributed to who I am as a person, and just really made me want to work harder, want to be better in my life and career in soccer,” Post said of the coaches.

After the U.S. — hopefully — wins gold in Tokyo, Post will return to Utah and wait for her LSAT results. She hopes to enroll at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law and continue playing club soccer at the university.

She plans to take a lighter work load in law school, so she’s able to continue training and playing for the national team, which she called her priority.

The U.S. Deaf Women’s National Team plays its first game of the 2025 Deaflympics on Friday against Japan at 8 p.m. MT. It will then play Australia on Tuesday at 8 p.m. MT and will then close out its group stage matches against Great Britain on Nov. 22 at 8 p.m. MT.

If the U.S. finishes in third or fourth place, it will play in the bronze medal match, but if it finishes in the top two, it will play for gold on Nov. 25.

Source: Utah News