Despite intensive therapy, Holly struggled socially. She was bullied throughout primary and secondary school, leading to agoraphobia and a period where she could not leave the house.<\/p>\n
“She didn’t want to live anymore,” Mrs Dalton says. “She’d ask why nobody liked her.”<\/p>\n
Everything changed when a support worker from the National Deaf Children’s Society referred her to the Newcastle United Foundation programme, designed for young people with additional needs.<\/p>\n
Holly immediately felt at home.<\/p>\n
“She didn’t need to mask,” Mrs Dalton says. “It was the first place she truly fit in.”<\/p>\n
Despite being visually impaired and deaf, Holly plays on the wing and connects with the ball “nine times out of ten”.<\/p>\n
For Holly, the sessions offer something even more important than sport.<\/p>\n
“It takes my mind off everything,” she says. “I get bullied a lot but, when I’m here, I forget about it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite intensive therapy, Holly struggled socially. She was bullied throughout primary and secondary school, leading to agoraphobia and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618489,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-618488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}