Miss-Delectable
New Member
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2004
- Messages
- 17,160
- Reaction score
- 7
Deaf players add twist to Taylor_'s team | The Journal Gazette
This is not where a body ought to be, at 10:30 on a summer morning. We ought to be outside. We ought to be poolside. We ought to be working on our tans, those of us who actually tan.
Instead?
Instead I’m slipping through a door left ajar, here at the back of the gym at Taylor-Fort Wayne. I hear athletic shoes squeak-squeak-squeaking, a winter sound. I hear the dull syncopation of basketballs. I hear one man’s voice, speaking in Coach-a-guese.
“Five out! Five out!” he’s shouting.
And say hello to Cleveland Inge, and goodbye to the ordinary. That’s his Taylor-Fort Wayne women’s basketball team out there on the floor. This is the first of three practices today. This is the fourth day of a six-day “boot camp” designed to allow Inge to separate the wheat from the chaff in a suddenly flush situation.
Twenty young women he has, he says, with a bit of wonder in his voice. Twenty young women who want to play basketball.
“I needed to do something to see where their heart is at,” says Inge, who, four years ago, started with eight women in his first season as coach.
And if it’s out of the ordinary … well, say hello to these two young women, Amanda Lewis and Amanda Didier.
Both are freshmen.
Both are hearing impaired.
Both wear a device called a cochlear implant, and both read lips to varying degrees, and both sign. And both are basketball players for Cleveland Inge.
Lewis is a guard from Lakota East High School in West Chester, Ohio, where she grew up playing softball and basketball with the boys in her neighborhood. Didier is a post player from Snider, where she not only lettered in basketball, but also in volleyball, softball and swimming.
Volleyball, she says, was the hardest, mainly because of the footwork. She says this by signing to Lewis, who better understands the questions because she’s worn the cochlear implant longer, and relays them by signing to Didier.
It’s a sight Inge has grown accustomed to, Didier and Lewis signing to each other … and then sharing a laugh. Sometimes he swears they’re talking about him. More often than that it strikes him how, yes, out of the ordinary this is.
Not one, but two hearing-impaired players. Which is OK, understand, because in his first season at TUFW he coached a girl who was legally blind . Which is further OK, because also on this team are two other players from Lewis’ high school (Jessica Lambert and Alex Hicks) and two others from Snider (Anjelica Glaspie and Alyssia Hawthorne), all of whom learned long ago how to communicate with their unique teammates.
“Other than that, it’s a first for everyone,” Inge says. “I’m learning just like my players are learning, and they’re learning from us, also.”
And sometimes in the learning … well, mistakes are made. Like the time one of Inge’s assistants mistakenly signed a word to Lewis and Didier that made their eyes widen in shock. Like Inge discovering that, as clever as he thought he was to use sign language to relay plays – something he’s done for years, he says – he was not nearly as clever as he thought he was.
“I found the other day that one of our plays, the sign for it was a female body part,” he says. “So we won’t be using that anymore.”
A rueful grin.
“It was embarrassing, but how was I supposed to know?”
Now he does, or is learning to. Now they all are. Now TUFW, whether in response to having two hearing-impaired basketball players or not, is offering signing as a foreign language for the first time this fall.
“My two girls better get ‘A’s’ in there, I can tell you that,” Inge says with a laugh.
Well, sure. If they didn’t it would be … out of the ordinary.
This is not where a body ought to be, at 10:30 on a summer morning. We ought to be outside. We ought to be poolside. We ought to be working on our tans, those of us who actually tan.
Instead?
Instead I’m slipping through a door left ajar, here at the back of the gym at Taylor-Fort Wayne. I hear athletic shoes squeak-squeak-squeaking, a winter sound. I hear the dull syncopation of basketballs. I hear one man’s voice, speaking in Coach-a-guese.
“Five out! Five out!” he’s shouting.
And say hello to Cleveland Inge, and goodbye to the ordinary. That’s his Taylor-Fort Wayne women’s basketball team out there on the floor. This is the first of three practices today. This is the fourth day of a six-day “boot camp” designed to allow Inge to separate the wheat from the chaff in a suddenly flush situation.
Twenty young women he has, he says, with a bit of wonder in his voice. Twenty young women who want to play basketball.
“I needed to do something to see where their heart is at,” says Inge, who, four years ago, started with eight women in his first season as coach.
And if it’s out of the ordinary … well, say hello to these two young women, Amanda Lewis and Amanda Didier.
Both are freshmen.
Both are hearing impaired.
Both wear a device called a cochlear implant, and both read lips to varying degrees, and both sign. And both are basketball players for Cleveland Inge.
Lewis is a guard from Lakota East High School in West Chester, Ohio, where she grew up playing softball and basketball with the boys in her neighborhood. Didier is a post player from Snider, where she not only lettered in basketball, but also in volleyball, softball and swimming.
Volleyball, she says, was the hardest, mainly because of the footwork. She says this by signing to Lewis, who better understands the questions because she’s worn the cochlear implant longer, and relays them by signing to Didier.
It’s a sight Inge has grown accustomed to, Didier and Lewis signing to each other … and then sharing a laugh. Sometimes he swears they’re talking about him. More often than that it strikes him how, yes, out of the ordinary this is.
Not one, but two hearing-impaired players. Which is OK, understand, because in his first season at TUFW he coached a girl who was legally blind . Which is further OK, because also on this team are two other players from Lewis’ high school (Jessica Lambert and Alex Hicks) and two others from Snider (Anjelica Glaspie and Alyssia Hawthorne), all of whom learned long ago how to communicate with their unique teammates.
“Other than that, it’s a first for everyone,” Inge says. “I’m learning just like my players are learning, and they’re learning from us, also.”
And sometimes in the learning … well, mistakes are made. Like the time one of Inge’s assistants mistakenly signed a word to Lewis and Didier that made their eyes widen in shock. Like Inge discovering that, as clever as he thought he was to use sign language to relay plays – something he’s done for years, he says – he was not nearly as clever as he thought he was.
“I found the other day that one of our plays, the sign for it was a female body part,” he says. “So we won’t be using that anymore.”
A rueful grin.
“It was embarrassing, but how was I supposed to know?”
Now he does, or is learning to. Now they all are. Now TUFW, whether in response to having two hearing-impaired basketball players or not, is offering signing as a foreign language for the first time this fall.
“My two girls better get ‘A’s’ in there, I can tell you that,” Inge says with a laugh.
Well, sure. If they didn’t it would be … out of the ordinary.