Volleyball
Favorite athlete: Brittany O’Hara – Moravian College volleyball
Favorite team: I don’t have one…I like to play more than I like to watch sports.
Favorite memory competing in sports: My freshman year of high school when I became the libero on the varsity volleyball team right in the middle of the game
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: Once when I went for the ball, I went right into a split!
Music on iPod: Dido
Future plans: College and travel
Words to live by: ‘Be true to yourself.’
One goal before turning 30: Parachuting
One thing people don’t know about me: I want my motorcycle license!
The scene is an ordinary one.
Jillian Bracken and Julie Bagley are practicing digs as they prepare for an early-season volleyball practice. The senior co-captains, referred to as the ‘wonder twins’ by coach Eric Headley, are having a lighthearted discussion about Bagley’s upcoming birthday plans – or lack thereof.
There’s nothing unusual about the scene until you consider that Bracken is deaf, a fact that is easy to forget not only for those around the Pennridge senior but also for Bracken herself.
“Sometimes I’ll forget I’m deaf, and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I can’t hear you,’” Bracken said with a smile.
Her coach admits he forgets as well.
“I’m amazed by her,” Headley said. “I have to literally remind myself because I talk a lot, and sometimes she lets me know she doesn’t pick up everything.”
Bracken has never considered her hearing impairment a disability. As a matter of fact, she manages to put a positive spin on everything that comes her way.
“My mom brought me up that way,” Bracken said matter-of-factly. “She says, ‘There’s always a positive side to everything, and nothing comes out of worrying.’
“I try to think of every positive side there is. Of course, there are negative sides, but I don’t really think about them.”
Bracken, according to her mother Nancy, came into the world with a smile on her face. She’s been smiling ever since.
“Her philosophy is to live life to the fullest and don’t let anything stand in your way,” her mother said.
Part of living life to the fullest for Bracken is playing libero for the Pennridge volleyball team. The senior captain is impossible to miss as she dives and sacrifices her body to dig up a ball.
“All I have to do is go for the ball and dig it,” Bracken said. “I just have to dig – stay low and bump it up.
“I also like hitting, but I’m too short for that, but being the libero is fun.”
Bracken – who measures in at 4-11 – got her first taste of playing libero when she was a freshman. She was a natural from the outset.
“I was nervous because I had no clue what it was,” she said. “I adjusted, and by the second game, I was like, ‘This is great. I can do whatever I want.”
That’s a philosophy Bracken has taken into her life, and she says she has tried everything.
“I’ve done track and softball,” the Pennridge senior said. “I’ve done basketball, gymnastics, volleyball. Some I didn’t like and others I did. Nothing has stopped me.”
Not even a hearing impairment that could have been devastating.
“I’ve never felt sorry for myself, not once, which people are shocked about,” Bracken said. “I’m just very, ‘Whatever – I can handle this, and that’s all that matters.’
“I wasn’t born deaf. I actually had hearing. It wasn’t until I was four years old that apparently I started losing it gradually, and by fifth grade, I lost it completely.”
In fifth grade, she received a cochlear implant, which – through the use of magnets – allows Bracken to hear.
“I can’t fully hear like (everyone else does) but almost,” she said. “To me, I feel like I do because I don’t know any different. It’s been great.”
Ask Bracken what it was like to go through something that traumatic as a youngster, and her response is typically upbeat.
“To be honest, I didn’t really think about it,” she said. “I was never one of those kids who would be like, ‘Why me?’ I was like, ‘Whatever - it is what it is.’
“I made my mom go crazy because I did not care. I was just very, ‘Yeah, I’m deaf. This is how it is. I’m just going to do everything I can do, no matter what they say.’ I do what I want, I’ll give you that.”
It’s a sense of adventure she may have inherited growing up in a neighborhood with an abundance of boys.
“My whole street is full of boys, and I had a brother, so I had to be like them,” Bracken said. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to let anything slow me down.’”
Bracken hasn’t let anything slow her down. She lives life on full throttle and always has.
“The first sport I ever did was dance, but that was too easy, I guess you could say,” she said. “So my mom put me in gymnastics when I was six or seven.
“I love doing slips and trying things that are really hard that I don’t know if I can do and just going for it. I’ll try anything that’s different.”
Bracken gave up competing in gymnastics in favor of volleyball when she was in middle school. She still goes to open gyms to ‘do flips and run around,’ but volleyball is her passion, and playing libero is a perfect fit.
“I liked it right away just because I was diving everywhere,” she said. “That was kind of my thing.”
Headley first met Bracken when she attended his summer volleyball camps.
“I coached her at camps when she was only 13 and 14, and I think it’s pretty natural for her to fight,” the Rams’ first-year coach said. “That’s what makes her who she is. Even at 13 and 14, she was fighting and working for it.
“She has this, ‘I want to prove to people I can do whatever I want,’ and that is what she decided she wanted to do.”
Headley can still remember when his Central Bucks East faced Bracken and her Pennridge squad when she was only a freshman.
“I think Pennridge was undefeated, and we smacked them around,” Headley said. “The main reason we smacked them around was because we kept the ball away from (Bracken). That was the only thing I had to worry about coming in here.”
For the past four years, Bracken has been the cornerstone of the Rams’ defense. It’s a position the all-league libero loves.
She is equally comfortable in the classroom where she is an A student. She is part of the Dual Enrollment program at Pennridge and takes some college classes while completing her requirements at the high school.
“I have never been in a special class for the deaf,” Bracken said. “People ask me, ‘Do you want to go to a deaf school?’ I’ll say, ‘No, I consider myself a hearing person.’”
At Pennridge, Bracken benefits from a sound field system - a type of microphone system -in her classrooms.
“I can hear everything the teacher says,” Bracken said. “Sometimes it’s hard to understand the kids. Sometimes they’re all the way on the other side of the room or on my right side.
“If you’re on my right ear and you’re trying to talk to me, most likely I won’t be able to hear you. People know they kind of have to look at me when they talk because I can read lips as well, and that’s normally what I did. That’s how I grew up.”
Bracken admits that she sometimes misses out on things in conversations.
“I’m never upset about it,” she said. “I’ll be like, ‘Whatever, I’ll get the next thing.’ I don’t really care.”
In her spare time, Bracken has helped out at the Bucks County Intermediate Unit where her mother is employed and last August spoke to a crowd of approximately a thousand teachers at their opening day ceremonies, encouraging them to continue to dedicate themselves to kids with special needs because of the realization that the support she has received has helped her to get to where she is today.
Although she has not decided on a college, Bracken has her sights set on a career in exercise science as a major. Volleyball may or may not be part of the future of a player that has been a fixture at Pennridge for four years..
“I’ve been coaching for a while, and it’s nice to get a kid who’s honest, works hard and might have her moments but talks to you about it,” Headley said. “She fights hard every day to work hard for the team and be a leader, all the while fighting obvious hearing impairments. She plays a very vocal sport and has had to work harder than everyone else on the court to get feedback and stay in the play.
“She’s a leader. She and Julie are great kids, and they’re doing a phenomenal job. They’re both great kids.”
Kids who talk about birthday plans and live life the way it’s meant to be lived – to the fullest.
