High-school bullying drove Meica to despair, until she discovered goalball

If it wasn’t for goalball, Meica Horsburgh thinks the worst may have happened to her.

“I don’t reckon I’d be alive,” she says.

“Maybe suicide, maybe getting mixed up with the wrong crowd. I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today.”

The 31-year-old is the captain of the Australian women’s goalball team, a sport for those who are blind or vision impaired where the object is to throw a ball into the opponent’s net to score.

Athletes have to wear blackout eye masks and the ball has bells inside.

Horsburgh will be playing goalball at her third Paralympics in Tokyo next year, but all of that seemed like an impossible dream when she was a teenager.

‘I hated my life so much’

Horsburgh is legally blind due to ocular albinism.

Two of her four siblings…