Ada And Asl Interpreters At A Sports League

Location: Virginia

I am part of a roughly 100 person non-profit sports league playing a fast-paced contact sport. We have practices 3x a week and have a deaf person requesting interpreting services during practice. We have 6 rotating player-coaches who demo/instruct on drills and explain the strategy. It can get technical so I understand why they would want someone for that. I would say like 20% of practice time is spent talking, while 80% of the time we are doing the drill ourselves and needing to communicate with our teammates about what is happening. Drill communication happens throughout the practice so someone would need to be scheduled for the entire practice. The coaches also interject when we are doing a drill to tweak something we are working on, but an interpreter wouldn't be able to just run alongside the person to translate what a teammate is saying or what the coach says during game-play.

There is also the issue of the person not attending every practice. Do we really have to pay hundreds of dollars to book an interpreter for every practice weeks in advance just for them to not show up that day? We also rely entirely on fundraising to be able to pay for our games, travel, etc. We have dues but they only cover our practice space rental. How do we determine if something is an undue burden financially or administratively? I feel like that is so much of a gray area that we have no clue how to even determine that. If an interpreter is $150 per practice, and we have to book them for every practice just in case, that is $1800 per month. We don't spend that much on any athlete even for travel, but we also make multiple thousand dollar purchases to book game-day spaces, travel expenses, and one end-of-year celebration, so are we expected to take away from our budget for other stuff to make this work? Are we supposed to pull from an excess in our budget to make it work? It is always fluctuating based on how much we can bring in through fundraising and it is not consistent year to year, so how do we determine that?

And then if we determine it is an undue burden, do we just tell the person tough luck? That doesn't seem reasonable either. We have tried providing microphones when we have meetings to amplify the speaker better, but again it is a contact sport, so we can't have the coaches (who are players as well) to be mic'd up only for it to get smashed when they are trying to demo the drill they are explaining, but I don't know what other accommodations we can try. During gameplay I know other leagues have implemented hand signals, but that doesn't cover everything.

We are just totally lost. What do we do?