Hearing Impaired Girl Writes Thank You Note to NFL Player - East Idaho News
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Hearing Impaired Girl Writes Thank You Note to NFL Player

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012214 DerrickColemanLetter?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1390405737511(NEW YORK) — The Seattle Seahawks’ fullback, who became a viral star after a Duracell commercial showed his unlikely path from legally deaf child to NFL superstar, will have two extra special fans cheering him on at next Sunday’s Super Bowl.

Riley and Erin Kovalcik, identical 7-year-old twin sisters from Roxbury, N.J., are also hearing impaired and now are also viral stars after their dad, Jake Kovalcik, tweeted a letter Riley wrote to the Seahawks’ Derrick Coleman.

“I know how you feel,” Riley wrote to Coleman. “I also have hearing aids. Just try your best. I have faif [sic] in you.”

Riley and Erin first learned about Coleman through his Duracell commercial, in which the 23-year-old, deaf since the age of 3, describes being picked on and told he would never succeed in football.

“They told me it couldn’t be done. That I was a lost cause. I was picked on. And picked last,” Coleman says in the commercial. “They gave up on me. Told me I should just quit.”

“I like that he actually can understand about being bullied and he actually knows more you know, stuff like if you have problems, he’s a guy you can come to,” Riley said Wednesday on ABC’s Good Morning America.

Jake Kovalcik says he was inspired to tweet his daughter’s letter to Coleman because he was so pleased that his daughters finally had a hearing impaired person in the public spotlight to look up to.

“There’s not a whole lot of really high-profile people or even athletes out there that are deaf that kids like Riley and Erin can look up to…that show that if you work hard, adversity really doesn’t matter,” Kovalcik said on GMA.

“Just that she was able to put that stuff into words and talk to how she felt about it, it was amazing,” he said of his daughter.

Since seeing the Duracell commercial, Riley and Erin have become Seattle Seahawks fans, and Riley even included a sentence of congrats to Coleman on his team’s defeat of the San Francisco 49ers to make it to the Super Bowl.

“Good job on the January 20th game,” she wrote, while also adding the things the two share in common, namely that they both love sports and wear hearing aids.

And when it comes to next Sunday, Feb. 2, when the Seahawks take on the Denver Broncos at New Jersey’s MetLife stadium for SuperBowl XLVIII, Riley and Erin said they will have only two words.

“Go Seahawks,” both girls said in unison on GMA.

Copyright 2014 ABC News Radio

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