Texas Tech player can hear the game
December 26, 2011
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — During the first several years of his basketball life,
Luke Adams could see the game and feel the game — but he couldn’t hear it.
Now a Texas Tech freshman guard, he was born almost completely deaf. Adams
says he has no hearing in his right ear and about 10 percent hearing
capability in his left ear.
At the age of 12, he was fitted with a cochlear implant — an electronic
hearing device, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,
“designed to produce useful hearing sensations to a person with severe to
profound nerve deafness by electrically stimulating nerves inside the inner
ear.”
With the cochlear implant, Adams hears virtually everything.
“It’s pretty crazy,” Adams said during a telephone interview. “As the
technology got better, it impacted a lot of people. You know when you open a
Sprite and you hear that fizz? I couldn’t hear that before. When I first
heard it, I was like, ‘Whoa, what was that?’ You hear so many little things
now.”
Like Oklahoma State’s Keiton Page, Adams is a coach’s son. His father is the
son of Mark Adams, who in 2010 coached the Howard (Texas) College basketball
team to the national junior-college championship.
Like Page, Luke Adams was a prolific high school scorer. As a senior at Big
Spring, he was the Texas Class 3A leader at 26.9 points per game.
Like Page, Adams is a shooter. Against Grambling State, because Red Raider
guard Toddrick Gotcher was sidelined with an ankle injury, Adams got his
first career start and capitalized with 15 points on 5-of-10 shooting from
3-point range.
“He can really shoot it and score,” said coach Billy Gillispie, whose Texas
Tech team plays at Oral Roberts. “He’s done a good job of making us better
offensively.”
Said Red Raider center Robert Lewandowski: “Luke is a great kind of spark
player. He plays hard all the time and he’s a great shooter … just a great
all-around player. He’s faced difficultly in his life, obviously, but I’ve
never heard him complain about that. I love the way he plays.”
Also like Page, Adams is undersized at 5-foot-9 and 150 pounds. Adams could
have been a scholarship player at any number of smaller schools, but chose
to walk on at Tech and compete for minutes in the Big 12.
“That’s another reason the Big 12 was attractive to me,” Adams said. “If
(Page) can do it, I can do it — it was that type of thing. Keiton made it
more of a positive way of looking at it.”
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Information from: Tulsa World, http://www.tulsaworld.com
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