National Football League

High-school freshman won't let having no arms stop NFL dreams

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 8:24 p.m. ET

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Isaac Lufkin has ambitions to play in the NFL, and he doesn’t see why not having any arms should stop him.

Lufkin is a freshman high school kicker in Rhode Island. He was born without arms, but he doesn’t consider that a condition worthy of anybody’s pity. If he drops his backpack and somebody picks it up for him, he tells CNN, he drops it again so he can pick it up himself.

“If I can’t do it,” he said, “nobody else is going to be able to do it, sooner or later.”

During games, Lufkin places the ball on the tee himself, sitting on the ground and pinching it with his two feet. He has shown a talent for accuracy in his kicks, and an extraordinary record on onside kick attempts.

But his ambitions extends beyond that. Lufkin wants to play on the defensive line ,and he says his lack of arms are an advantage that make him unblockable.

“They can’t grab my arms, they can’t grab my jersey,” he said. “The only thing they can do is actually block, but I can still crawl under them. And it’s not like they can sit on me.”

He’d be an inspiration to disabled kids, except that neither he nor anybody in his family sees him that way.

”I don’t find him disabled at all,” said his mother, Lori. “And I never looked at him that way.”

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