Jacob Szymanski

That's something that would definitely resonate with the blind community.

Have you thought about what this book might mean to able-bodied people, people who have never heard of parasports before, and what they could take out of it?

obstacles and wanting to remove all excuses in your life that's universal regardless of whether or not you have a disability and you lost you said 90 of your vision that's pretty significant and in para sports in blind sports players are classified from b1 b2 b3 b1 being the highest degree of visual impairment

At what level are you, and can you give us an idea of when you're on the ice, what it is that you can and can't visually see?

Now, in the book, outside of the hockey that you describe, and you describe it in detail, what was going on in your personal life, your professional life, as you were picking up blind hockey?

Yeah.

When you lose your vision, you have to relearn things.

And...

that process of learning can be really difficult.

And when you're struggling with it, I often find that that can be the rock bottom moment.

But when you start succeeding and learning adaptations, it's really satisfying.

Like genuinely satisfying, very gratifying.

And I can only imagine what it must have felt like those first couple of times, you know, you started taking real strides in skating, pun intended.

Now that's a good teammate right there.

It builds your confidence and it develops your character too.

And it's interesting because that's what organized team sports started out as being in the first place.

Back in like the 1800s, they were character building exercises to develop things like accountability and sportsmanship and camaraderie.

teamwork being part of a team and all of those things apply not just on the ice or whatever sport you're playing but in your real life too and it's that same sort of lesson is those same sorts of lessons that you learn playing sports that can actually inform your life when you're trying to learn to rehabilitate after gaining a disability later on in life

That's exactly full circle, isn't it?

Full circle.