High school basketball player aims to be example for the deaf
ROCKVILLE, MD. Rockville High School forward Blessed Mbogo runs through a screen, separates from his defender and spots up at the top of the key for an open three-pointer, the ball falling through the net so cleanly it makes the most coveted sound in basketball: swish.
As Mbogo backpedals on defence, Rockville’s public address announcer yells his name over the home gym’s speakers. Cheerleaders shake their pompoms and those in Rockville’s packed student section let out a collective shout as the Rams add onto their lead.
Mbogo, a 6-foot-4 senior forward and one of Rockville’s best players, doesn’t hear any of it. He is deaf.
“I feel like I have to represent the deaf community,” Mbogo said, answering questions by reading them off the reporter’s notebook. “I have to show them we can do it, too.”
Since birth, Mbogo has been deaf, a diagnosis his father, Frederick, said doctors couldn’t find a cause for. Born in Uganda, Mbogo learned Bantu and got through his early childhood by reading others’ lips. When Mbogo was six, his family immigrated to the United States. In addition to learning English, Mbogo picked up on American Sign Language.
“Changing the language and the difficulty in hearing and the sudden change in environment,” Frederick Mbogo said, “it was a challenge.”
Mbogo enrolled in a Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHOH) program, which appoints him cued speech transliterators for class and after-school activities. Just a handful of affected students participate in varsity athletics.
Mbogo obtained a cochlear implant for his right ear, and that allows him to hear faint sounds. He believes he can pick up about 70 per cent of sounds while wearing his cochlear implant, but he still needs to read lips to understand what people are saying. Without the implant, he said he hears about 30 per cent of sounds, such as the beat of a song but not the words.
When he’s playing basketball, Mbogo doesn’t wear his cochlear implant, worried it will fall off. So as his teammates crack jokes in the locker-room before a recent game, Mbogo sits silently and stretches. Eventually, he wants in on the joke and asks a teammate what they’re discussing.
Mbogo often misses out on banter, and he’s the only player not keyed in on Todd Dembroski when the fourth-year coach enters the locker-room and begins his pregame speech. Mbogo looks past Dembroski toward the whiteboard behind him, where a cued speech transliterator uses her hands to communicate what Dembroski is
saying.
About a half-hour later in Rockville’s gym, Sirius, by the Alan Parsons Project blasts over the speakers as Mbogo and the Rams’ starters take their seats on the bench and wait for the P.A. announcer to call their names. To know it’s his turn to stand up and run onto the court between the school’s cheerleaders, Mbogo looks to his left and sees teammate Jailen Anderson raise his hand.
Entering high school, Mbogo hadn’t played much organized basketball — mostly pickup ball with his friends — but he tried out for Rockville’s team as a freshman.
When Dembroski learned of Mbogo, he wondered how it would work having a deaf player on his team. But once he noticed Mbogo’s transliterator helping him understand everything Dembroski and his assistants said, his worries vanished.
Mbogo made the junior varsity team, and Rockville established hand signals for every play — signs it still uses. Mbogo developed into a varsity player by the end of his sophomore year.
This season for the Rams (8-9), Mbogo is averaging seven points and five rebounds per game while shooting 56 per cent from the field. Mbogo serves as a power forward who can both play in the post and shoot from the perimeter.
Sometimes Mbogo will miss an in-game assignment. Before games, Dembroski tells the referees Mbogo is deaf in case he overlooks a call.
But Mbogo’s condition barely limits him on the court, and he’s eager to spread that message. This past fall, Mbogo ran a basketball clinic for DHOH middle schoolers.
“It’s great for a freshman to maybe come in and see, hey, there’s a DHOH student on the varsity basketball team,” Dembroski said. “Not only on the team, but a captain of the team; one of the leaders; one of the guys that everybody on the team looks to as a role model.”
In his team’s 83-46 win over the Falcons, Mbogo scores 10 points and secures key rebounds before sitting the fourth quarter after the Rams built a 31-point lead.
After the game, Dembroski pauses in the middle of his post-game speech and looks at Mbogo.
“All right, Blessed,” Dembroski says as Mbogo’s eyes shift from his transliterator to his coach. “Great job tonight.”
When the talk is finished, Mbogo goes to his locker to retrieve his cochlear implant. He hears some sounds again, and he walks back through the gym to meet his father and head toward home. The fans who crowded the bleachers have left. The gym is quiet. To Mbogo, it’s the same as usual.
Time is running out on his senior season, and though Mbogo is undecided on where he’ll attend college (he is enrolled in the International Baccalaureate program, one of the U.S.’S most challenging high school course loads) he knows he wants to play basketball. He would be an anomaly.
Michael Lizarraga, who graduated from California State Northridge in 2012, was the most recent deaf men’s Division I basketball player. Gallaudet, a Division III school, fields the nation’s only deaf men’s college basketball team.
In 2008, Lance Allred became the first deaf player in the NBA but played only part of one season with the Cleveland Cavaliers. Former WNBA all-star Tamika Catchings also has hearing loss. Mbogo aspires to be like them.
Allred, who now gives motivational speeches, has some advice.
“All my life people have been telling me what I can and can’t do. I simply choose not to listen. I can’t hear very well, anyway,” Allred said. “To this kid, I would tell him, ‘Yeah, you can’t hear them anyway, so don’t listen. Don’t buy into people’s limitations and just go out and play ball.’ “
Twice, Mbogo was cut from his middle school basketball team, a slight that’s driven him.
“Playing college basketball, it would mean a lot to me,” Mbogo said. “I’m not really doing it for myself. I want to show that people like me can do anything.”
The Washington Post