By Elliott West
Introduction
Playing any sport can be hard and especially to a high standard but imagine if you were partially sighted and took up snooker. Well, that is exactly what Northern Ireland’s Stephanie Coyle has done. Against all odds, she first picked up a snooker cue when she was given a snooker table as a Christmas present, aged only 11 years old. The Belfast player whose snooker hero is Ronnie O’Sullivan, couldn’t see anything three metres in front of her but this hasn’t stopped her from pursuing a career in the sport that she truly loves. Shortness of sight has been vastly improved by a recent cataract operation. A feat that has led her to become a member of the Northern Ireland Billiards and Snooker Association for a short while.
Rewriting History
In a sport that is still largely male-dominated, it would be very easy for a woman to stay clear of snooker as a career aspiration. However, Stephanie Coyle is a person that doesn’t have the word impossible in her vocabulary. A member of the Cozy Snooker Club in Dundonald, Coyle hasn’t let a four-year break from snooker or the recent lockdowns in Northern Ireland, where the country has seen the strictest and longest Coronavirus restrictions in place, crush her dream of success.
Stephanie who has played snooker with Mark Allen and Jordan Brown now wants to play snooker for the WDBS (World Disability and Billiards Snooker), believing that her overall game would improve if she was given the chance to compete alongside other players with disabilities. A quest that does come with a price as the majority of such tournaments are played in England.
Coyle tries to practice as much as possible, setting aside five hours of her weekend to snooker, using a cueing aid called the Blade Cue Pocket Trainer and spending time with a coach called Gary from her local snooker club. Steff swears by this practice tool, saying of it :
“The Blade Cue Trainer is an amazing tool. It helps me cue accurately and prevents any reoccurring bad habits of putting unintentional side spin on the cue ball. It’s very well designed and I would recommend to any level of player”.
Stephanie Coyle
This 33-year-old inspiration has so many strings to her bow, being able to play snooker one-handed and also plays blind tennis with the DSNI (Disability Sport Northern Ireland). A fantastic venture that allows with varying degrees of sight impairment to participate in a sport that they clearly love but would not be able to if programmes like this didn’t exist. Any disability should never stop you from doing what you want to do in life and the possibilities are endless when the barriers are removed :
“I play Blind Tennis with DSNI (Disability Sport Northern Ireland. It’s brilliant it’s amazing to see people with different abilities than myself participating in the Blind Tennis. People with a disability are really amazing, they never let there Disability get them down they also play to the best of their ability.”
Stephanie Coyle
Steff, nicknamed “Thundershots”, admits that the first time she played Mark Allen at the 147 Snooker Club in Antrim, she was shaking like a leaf, not being able to look at her famous opponent and believing she would lose even before she had even struck the cue ball. However this was a crucial learning curve, it was the occasion that proved to herself that this was the sport for her. That was back in 2017 and if she was given the opportunity to play him again, a refreshed a confident opponent would appear as his challenger, making the prospect of a victory much more realistic.
Summary
Steff Coyle is a breath of fresh air, an inspiration to women inside and outside sport and especially to anyone who lives day to day with a recognisable or hidden disability. The world is a hard enough place to live in at the best of times but people with disabilities shouldn’t be spotlighted or set aside from the rest of society, they are part of society like everyone else and should be given the same opportunities that an able-bodied person has in life. Coyle reinforces that and shows that when setting your mind to something, anything is possible and the sky is the limit!
