By Eric Butler
MaxPreps.com
Luke Adams is familiar with what is known in some circles as "deaf speech" – the slight slurring of words by people who have never actually been able to hear anyone speak the language perfectly.
Adams is actually one of those people, although you'd never be able to tell just by talking to him.
A sophomore guard for Trinity Christian in Lubbock, Adams is a good ballhandler, a solid shooter and a tremendous weapon in a spread offense as he can drive to the bucket with productive results despite his 5-foot-7 stature.
But what stands out the most about Adams is that he's almost completely deaf and has been since birth.
"I was deaf when I was born, but my parents really didn't know it until later on when I was two," says Adams, in perfectly articulated speech. "I kind of had a little deaf speech until about five or six years ago."
What changed for Adams, and what makes his disability almost indiscernible, is what's known as a cochlear implant. It's a device that stimulates any still-functioning auditory nerves by means of a microphone, speech procesor, an RF transmitter and an RF receiver implanted underneath the skull's skin.
Adams has an earpiece which is connected to a wire that leads to a spot behind his ear. By means of a magnet, held in place by a head sweatband, Adams is able to access the implanted receiver.
"Now I can't hear," says Adams as he unhooks the device from his head, following a 69-61 victory at Clovis, NM.
After he puts the magnet back in place, Adams adds, "Now I can."
Trinity Christian competes in the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools (TAPPS) at the Class 4A (out of five) level. That makes the Lions one of the bigger TAPPS schools statewide, but the Lubbock school still has less than 300 students.
Although small, the boys basketball team is more than competitive with much bigger public schools. Coached by former Texas Tech player Todd Duncan, the Lions have knocked off Amarillo Palo Duro and Clovis – among other big schools – en route to a 24-4 record as the playoffs approach.
Adams' father is Mark Adams, head men’s basketball coach at Howard Junior College. Located in Big Spring, Texas, Howard is an hour-and-a-half daily drive from the Adams' home in Lubbock. Mark Adams, however, says he's more than happy to do the commute to keep his son at Trinity Christian.
"I haven't moved my family because we think so much of Trinity and coach Duncan and that school there that we want them in that environment," Adams said.
Mark Adams was coaching at Texas-Pan American when he realized that his young son was deaf.
"Even when he was young, we'd notice that he'd try to move our heads so he could see our mouths," Mark Adams says. "So he was learning to read lips at a very young age. At about two-and-a-half is when we realized he was profoundly hearing-impaired. He was a seventh-grader when we decided to go ahead and get the cochlear implant."
"He had been able to hear things like thunder and other very low frequencies. When you do something like this, you take out what little hearing that you have in order to do the implant," he adds. "In a quiet environment, he can now hear as well as any of us. With a lot of background noise, and a gym is one of the worst places for that, he still has a lot of difficulty.
"He's a very hard worker, but we're still learning how to deal with all the equipment – the batteries, the head band, the device itself, so it's still very much a work in process."
